


Damage Control

by The_Bookkeeper



Series: Shelter [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Burnout - Freeform, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Sexual Doctor/Jack, Post Voyage of the Damned, References to Suicide, References to Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 23,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Bookkeeper/pseuds/The_Bookkeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Psychic aliens are in Cardiff, the Doctor is in the Hub, and Jack is worried.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Doctor-centric Torchwood story, if that makes any sense. Set after Voyage of the Damned for the Doctor and after Sleeper for Torchwood. Quite definitively AU, as it ignores the rest of season four entirely.
> 
> A few disclaimers:
> 
> 1\. I have seen all Torchwood episodes up to this point and most after, but I have not watched them as often or obsessively as I have Doctor Who. I think that I have a fairly good grasp on the characters, and have done research on the tricky bits (like the layout of the Hub), but if you see any mistakes, feel free to point them out.
> 
> 2\. There seem to be contradictory accounts on whether or not Jack sleeps. For the purposes of this story, he can, but doesn't have to.
> 
> On with show!
> 
> In which Jack’s day is ruined, Ianto is confrontational, and the Doctor relates a tale which he rather wouldn’t.

Jack sighed, running a hand tiredly over his face. It was times like these, when the Hub was silent and empty, and he had spent the past two days running after Weevils and all night filling out paperwork, that he really missed the mortal excuse of needing sleep. He glanced at his watch. Nearly six AM. Ianto would be here soon to get the coffee started.

   He stood up and stretched, taking the opportunity to glance down at the main area. Everything appeared to be in order. The pterodactyl was nowhere in sight, presumably sleeping; one of the lights on the far side was flickering, he’d have to remember to bug Ianto about that; the doors were all secure, not that he had expected any differently; the Doctor was leaning over Gwen’s computer – wait. _What?!_

   “ _Doctor?!_ ” Jack yelped, his voice jumping embarrassingly in pitch.

   “Hello, Jack,” said the Doctor absently, not even looking up from the computer screen as Jack practically flew down the stairs. “You don’t mind if I borrow your systems for a bit, do you?”

   “Well, seeing as you’ve already broken through our supposedly impenetrable security completely undetected, I don’t suppose it matters much if I do,” said Jack dryly, but without bitterness. The Doctor’s head snapped up, his eyes wide.

   “What?” he asked, sounding horrified. “No! No no no no no. If you don’t want me to – I mean, obviously I wouldn’t – I just thought –”

   “Doctor!” Jack cut him off, more than a little alarmed by his friend’s reaction. “It’s fine. I was joking. Of course you can use the computers.”

   “Right,” said the Doctor, squeezing his eyes shut and knocking his glasses askew as his pinched the bridge of his nose. “Joking. Of course. Thank you.”

   “No problem,” said Jack slowly, taking a moment to observe the Doctor more closely. The Time Lord looked even more exhausted than Jack felt. His face was pale, accenting the dark circles under his eyes, and – was that --? Yes. It was hard to be sure, as his nimble fingers skittered over the keyboard, but it seemed that his hands were trembling.

    _God, Doctor, what have you been doing to yourself?_

   Jack knew better than to actually ask if he wanted to get an answer. Instead, he leaned in to get a better look at the screen. The Doctor was scrolling through pages too fast for him to make much out, but it looked like he was looking at news postings.

   “So,” said Jack, trying to keep his voice light and casual. “Not that I’m complaining, but is there any particular reason that you’re breaking into Torchwood Three at six in the morning to hijack our computers?”

   “Hm? Oh, the TARDIS is busy refueling; I thought I’d give her a bit of a break. I just need to check a couple things, and since I was here anyway . . .” He trailed off with a vague wave of his hand that could have meant ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ or ‘daddy’s busy; run along and play’ or ‘something behind you is on fire; hadn’t you better put it out?’

   Jack glanced over his shoulder, found nothing to be aflame, and turned back to the Doctor.

 “Okay. So what are those things that you’re checking?”

   “I was just passing through, noticed some irregularities in the psychic signature of the area. Not wholly unexpected, what with the Rift and all, but it can’t hurt to make sure. Probably nothing to worry about.”

   Jack shut his eyes and resisted the urge to bang his head against the nearest wall. Knowing the Doctor, that meant that sometime in the next twenty-four hours he was going to find himself running for his life – well, his consciousness -- from psychic aliens bent on world domination.

   “Right,” he said. “My team’ll be in soon. Let me know if you need anything.”

   The Doctor made a vague sound which meant that he probably hadn’t heard a word Jack had just said. Jack rolled his eyes and moved away. He had been looking forward to a relatively quiet day – finish up the last of his paperwork; distract the rest of the team from theirs; maybe play a bit of basketball. Now, his mind was buzzing with a host of new dilemmas: most immediately, how to explain the Doctor’s presence to his team, but also how to deal with the Doctor’s obviously ill health without him bolting and, on a related note, whether or not to contact one Martha Jones.

   The invisible lift rumbled to life, almost drowning out the clatter as the Doctor jumped terribly and knocked a box of pens off the desk. Jack shot him a concerned look as he moved to head off Ianto, who had just slid into sight.

   “It’s alright,” said Jack quickly as Ianto’s hand jumped to his gun upon seeing the Doctor. “He’s supposed to be here.” Well, that was a bit of a stretch. The Doctor wasn’t really _supposed_ to be anywhere, but Jack intended to make sure that he at least had somewhere where he was welcome.

   The Doctor tucked his glasses into his pocket and came forward.

   “Hello,” he said, “You must be one of Jack’s teammates. I’m the Doctor.” His voice was cheerful and he was grinning, outwardly amiable and benign, but his eyes were dark and calculating. He was sizing up his new acquaintance, trying to decide whether he was an enemy, and if so, whether he was enough of a threat to bother with. Ianto wasn’t doing the same, which told Jack that he had already come to a decision.

   “I know who you are,” the young man said stiffly. The Doctor’s grin faltered, but only slightly.

   “Heard of me, have you?” he asked, keeping his tone light and casual.

   Jack edged around until he was almost between the two of them. He would have liked them to work this out their own – actually, what he would have really liked was to never to have to deal with the two of them in the same room, or at least to have a chance to talk with both of them first – but he was ready to intervene if things got out of hand. Not that he expected them to, as neither the Doctor nor Ianto tended to be violent, but tensions were running high and the last thing he wanted was either of them hurt.

   “I used to work for Torchwood One,” said Ianto, and his tone was bold, like a challenge. “I was at the Battle of Canary Warf.”

   The grin – more than half fake to begin with – slid off the Doctor’s face. There was a flash of anger, but it was gone as soon as it arrived, leaving loss and sorrow and old pain that hurt like yesterday.

  “I’m sorry,” said the Doctor, and Jack wanted to shake him, wanted to yell at him that _it wasn’t his fault_ , that Torchwood had been screwing around with things they shouldn’t have, that he was the one who had _saved_ the planet. “I’m so sorry.”

   Jack saw a dozen different responses buzzing in Ianto’s head, probably ranging from shooting the Doctor on the spot to ‘sorry won’t bring Lisa back’ to saying nothing at all. He glanced at Jack, and he must have seen the request in his eyes ( _let it go, just for now, we can deal with this later_ ), because he nodded and adjusted his stance to something less hostile.

   “Do you prefer tea or coffee?” he asked, stiff professionalism replacing his earlier antagonism.

   “Tea would be lovely,” said the Doctor with a relieved smile, and this one was far more genuine. “Three sugars, no cream.”

  Ianto nodded again and went to put the kettle on. Jack looked back to make sure that the Doctor was absorbed in his work before following.

 ~~~

   Jack was able to convince Ianto to give the Doctor a chance, and the introductions to the rest of the team went more smoothly, once Jack assured them that he would not be disappearing again. They were all suspicious at first – Jack couldn’t really blame them, considering what had happened the last time an old friend of his had dropped in – but were quickly won over by the Doctor’s cheerful enthusiasm. Well, except for Owen, who was mostly acting annoyed and making lewd insinuations which Jack parried easily and the Doctor purposely misinterpreted. Jack suspected that the Doctor’s unusually frail appearance was working in his favor – he didn’t look like a threat to anyone but himself, at the moment.

   Sure enough, Owen sidled up to him at around eight thirty, while the Doctor and Tosh were constructing some sort of special sensors to take a closer look at the Doctor’s psychic anomalies (which, true to form, were turning out to be a bigger deal than originally thought).

   “Your friend might call himself a doctor, but he looks like shit,” said the smaller man bluntly.

   “I know,” Jack replied evenly.

   “You planning to do anything about it?” Owen might have been a mean bastard in general, but he was a doctor for a reason. The Doctor irritated him, but he was not about to ignore anyone who was obviously unhealthy, especially when said person was within Torchwood.

   Jack was saved from having to answer when Gwen’s voice drifted over, startled and concerned.

   “Doctor, what happened to your neck?”

   The Doctor jumped. “What?” His hand went automatically to the back of his neck, and he winced and continued before Gwen could respond. “Oh, that. Yes. Bit of an incident on the moon of Taxial IV, nothing to worry about.”

   “Let me see,” said Jack, who had made his way down to them. He pushed the Doctor’s hand away and pulled down his collar before he could respond. The Time Lord jerked away with a noise of protest, shooting him an affronted look, but Jack still managed to glimpse what had once been a deep incision running horizontally across the base of his neck. “I thought Time Lords couldn’t scar,” he said, crossing his arms and refusing to be moved by the Doctor’s (admittedly excellent) impression of a kicked puppy.

   “We – I don’t,” said the Doctor, giving up on looking injured and going for resigned instead. “Not generally. But there are certain things – a couple types of radiation, a few toxins – that impair the regenerative process.”

   “Fiend Fire and Basilisk venom?” suggested Ianto dryly from where he was pretending to tidy up. Jack had no idea what he was talking about, but the Doctor nodded absently as turned back to his contraption. His mouth kept going, but it was obvious that his thoughts were elsewhere.   “Mm, yes, quite. You know, I saved the world with J. K. Rowling once. Well, with her words. We-ell, it was really Martha Jones and Shakespeare who did most of the saving –”

   “Doctor,” said Jack, cutting off was he was sure was a very interesting story (absolutely sure, because he had heard it already from Martha). “You still haven’t answered Gwen’s question. What happened to your neck?”

   “Like I said, small incident on the moon of Taxial IV, all healed up now –”

   “Taxial IV?” interrupted Jack, knowing an evasion when he heard it. “With all those research facilities on its moon in the forty-ninth century?”

   “Yep. Landed in one of them; turns out it was a restricted area. Least I didn’t get executed, which is what they wanted to do to me at first. A bit nasty, that lot. No sense of humor.”

   “So why _didn’t_ they execute you?” asked Gwen curiously, and she didn’t know the Doctor well enough to notice that his light, absentminded tone was all an act, that his eyes had gone dark and his grip had tightened on his sonic screwdriver.

   “One of the . . . _researchers_ who caught me was an expert in neurobiology. I have a very interesting nervous system. Unique, in fact.” His voice had taken a bitter edge that everyone could hear, now. Jack was beginning to get a picture of what was coming next, and it wasn’t pretty.

   “So, what, they tied you down and dissected you like a frog?” drawled Owen, who never knew when to keep his mouth shut.

   “Sort of,” said the Doctor, his artificially casual manner beginning to crack. “Scalpels and such are all a bit obsolete by that time, of course, especially when you’re only interested in the nervous system. They just needed an incision near the spinal cord to send the nanobots in – and they needed me awake and talking, to tell them where it hurt when they poked at my brain. That was the idea, anyway,” he said darkly, with a bitter smile. “I didn’t cooperate.”

  “That’s terrible!” gasped Gwen, and by the look of things, the others agreed with her. Tosh had stopped working on the sensors, her face pale and horrified. Ianto had given up any pretence of being busy, and was staring at the Doctor as if he had never seen him before. Owen looked ill, though he was trying to hide it.

   It was even worse than they were imagining, Jack knew. If they had had the Doctor strapped down, his nervous system almost literally at their fingertips, and he had refused to cooperate . . . . There had been whispers, when he had been a conman and pretending to be more of a criminal than he was. Rumors of a method of torture, very risky, very effective, and _very_ illegal. You opened up the victim’s brain, found the pain center. Kept stimulating it until they either gave you what you wanted or passed out. Woke them up and started over. Hoped that they didn’t go mad, because then they were no use to you. Hope that _you_ didn’t go mad from the screaming . . . .

  Jack gave the others a Look, and they quickly found somewhere else to be. Once they were left alone – sort of, because Jack didn’t doubt that at least some of the team was watching on the surveillance cameras – he turned to the Doctor, careful to stay within his line of sight. This Doctor wasn’t quite as jumpy as his previous incarnation, but with the knowledge of recent events Jack wasn’t going to take any chances.

   “How long?” he asked simply.

   “Oh, the sensors should be ready fairly soon, thirty minutes at the most –”

   “ _Doctor._ ”

   The Doctor was silent for a long time, long enough that Jack wasn’t sure he was going to respond.

   “Three days,” he said at last, his voice so low that it was almost inaudible. Jack let out his breath in a sharp gush, but didn’t give any other indication of his shock. The longest he had ever heard of anyone holding out was thirty-eight hours.

   “And how long since then?”

   “Two. I had some loose ends to tie up, and then the TARDIS needed to refuel.”

    _Loose ends_. Jack knew exactly what he was talking about. The shady dealings of the Taxial IV research facilities had only been revealed through the testimony of the test subjects, all of whom had been mysteriously transported to the planet’s surface just minutes before the moon, with all its facilities and some of its staff, spontaneously broke orbit and fell into their sun. No one ever found out what had happened.

   And the Doctor had gone straight from being horrifically tortured to incinerating a moon to building sensors to track psychic aliens. By the look of him, he hadn’t even paused to sleep – or to eat.

    _He’s self-destructing._ They had all gone through hell and he and Martha had run back to their individual support networks. They had left the Doctor alone to fight the monsters of the Universe, and he was losing to the ones within his own soul.

   That settled it. They would deal with these so-called psychic anomalies, and then he was calling Martha. The two of them would not let the Doctor take off again, to keep running until he crashed and burned.

   “You said the sensors were almost ready?” Stop the (probably) imminent apocalypse first, stop his friend/mentor/other-member-of-a-ridiculously-difficult-to-define-relationship from falling apart later.

   “Yep,” said the Doctor. The chipper note in his voice was still forced, but some of the darkness had left his eyes – not gone, but pushed beneath the surface for the moment. “It would go faster, though, if I had Ms. Sato to help me.”

  “Right. I’ll send her down.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tosh is distracted, the Doctor makes up words, and Jack is frustrated.

  Tosh tried to focus on following the Doctor’s instructions, but it was difficult. Normally, she would have been fascinated by the complicated alien device which the Doctor threw together as if it was a primary school science project, but now she couldn’t keep her attention from drifting to her strange partner (instructor, more like. She couldn’t make heads or tails of whatever they were doing.). Her eyes kept flickering, unbidden, to the back of his neck, which he rubbed absently every few minutes.

    She had heard of him, of course. Knew about his connection with Canary Warf; had read a few of the files on him on the rare slow day. She thought that her previous knowledge had actually made it more of a shock when she finally met him in person. After the stories of werewolves and living plastic and green, bug-eyed monsters, she had expected him to look, well . . . scary. Or a bit intimidating, at least. Instead, he just looked like any youngish human man, albeit with odd taste in footwear and liable to snap in a light breeze. Talking to him, he got a bit more unusual, babbling at ninety miles an hour about spatial genetic multiplicity and psychic anomalies and quantum mechanics, but he was still . . . real. She had been expecting some powerful, otherworldly being, and what she had gotten was just a person.

   When he thought no one was looking and the grin slid off his face, he looked unspeakably tired. She wondered how long it had been since he had been strapped down and sliced open and subjected to things that she couldn’t even imagine – didn’t want to imagine. She wondered how many other scars he carried beneath his skin, and how many he had received while defending a country and a planet that had showed its gratitude by declaring him Enemy Number One.

   “Ah ha!” The Doctor’s triumphant shout cut through her musings and made her jump.

   “Is it ready?” she asked

   “Yep!” he replied, popping the P, and his manic grin was just this side of sane. “Now, we just flip this switch . . .”

   The machine whirred to life, more smoothly than Tosh had expected from its haphazard appearance. The screen – Owen’s stolen iPod (the Doctor had promised to put it back together later, but Jack had just sighed and said he’d pay for a new one) – flickered to life, and figures began to scroll across it. They were incomprehensible to Tosh, but the Doctor watched intently, his face growing darker by the second. Finally he sat back and ran a hand through his hair with a sigh.

   “Doctor?” she prompted hesitantly.

   “Right,” he said with a burst of unexpected energy, leaping up. “There’s good news and bad news. Good news is, I know what’s going on and I know how to stop it. Bad news is, I won’t be able to do it myself, which means you lot have a busy day ahead of you.”

   “Why am I not surprised?” said Jack from behind her. She jumped again, but not as badly as the Doctor. “I’ll gather the team in the conference room. You can explain to us there.”

 ~~~

   Jack and the Doctor sat at opposite ends of the table. Gwen had been observing them ever since she arrived, and she couldn’t make sense of their relationship. Despite Owen’s unsubtle remarks, she didn’t think they were sleeping together – besides the fact that the Doctor wasn’t human (which didn’t necessarily rule out anything), the amused exasperation with which he responded to Jack’s half-joking flirtation told her that he was not interested in the least, even if Jack was. Jack treated the Doctor with a strange mixture of hero-worship and protectiveness, and the Doctor responded with . . . well, not much, beyond a slightly deeper version of the same amiability with which he treated everyone else and an odd defensiveness. Still, he was preoccupied at the moment. Maybe he was different when they weren’t busy saving the world.

   “So, Doc, what are we dealing with?” asked Jack once they were all settled.

   “Cardiff has an infestation of affectavores,” said the Doctor without preamble.

   “Never heard of them,” said Jack.

   “No, you wouldn’t have, because I just made that up. Fancy way of saying they eat emotions. Not actual emotions,” he continued, gesturing expansively and ignoring Owen’s eye roll, “just the echoes. Remnants, after the people who had the emotions have already left. They hang around places where emotions run high – hospitals, churches, pubs – and soak up the leftovers once everybody’s gone home for the night. They’re invisible, formless, so people tend not to notice them.”

   “They sound harmless,” said Gwen with a frown.

   “Oh, they are, generally,” agreed the Doctor with an approving nod. “The problem isn’t their eating habits; it’s their defense mechanism. They’re empathic, which is how they feed on emotions – so when they’re threatened, they use that to stir up negative emotions in their attacker. Cause flashbacks, that sort of thing. It doesn’t do lasting damage, usually, but it distracts them long enough for the affectavore to get away.”

   “Hold on,” said Owen. “We’d have noticed if people were having unexplained flashbacks. We monitor all the news outlets and police reports for things like that.”

   Gwen could hear the underlying _we’re not completely useless, you know._

     “Ah, but that’s the thing!” said the Doctor enthusiastically. “There haven’t been any flashbacks!”

   They all stared at him blankly for a moment, and Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

   “Doctor, you’re not making sense. If these . . . emotion-eater things are here, why aren’t they causing flashbacks?”

   “Because the defense mechanism doesn’t work on humans! You’re not psi-sensitive enough. You’d feel it, yeah, but it wouldn’t be strong enough for you to realize that it’s from an outside source. You’d just . . . feel a bit depressed, or find yourself dwelling on past mistakes. Enough to affect you, but not obvious enough that you’d avoid the spot where the affectavores are.”

   “Which means that you’d have no idea what was going on,” said Gwen slowly, reasoning her way out from the information he had already given her, “which would make you even more anxious.”

   “And so maybe you go to your doctor, or to a church, or to drown your sorrows,” Jack added, “except there are even more emotion-eaters there, and nobody knows enough to avoid them, and next thing you know half of Cardiff wants to top itself.”

   “Pretty much, yeah,” said the Doctor with a grimace. “We-ell, not _quite_ that drastic; they only dig up the emotions that are already there, after all, make hidden things visible, but you get the basic concept. Not good for morale.”

   “Alright,” said Owen with a yawn to show just how uninteresting he found this whole business. “You said infestation. So how do we exterminate them?”

  Jack’s wince was simultaneous with the abrupt stiffening of the Doctor’s spine.

   “We don’t,” the Doctor snapped, his tone as startling and ominous as a sudden flash of lightning, his face dark and foreboding. He softened again a moment later, explaining calmly, “They’re just animals; they don’t know what they’re doing. We just need to contain them, and then I can take them back home. Mind you, when I say ‘we,’ I actually mean ‘you’ – it would be a very bad idea for me to get anywhere near them when they’re still loose.”

    “Why?” asked Gwen, trying not to be put off by his previous flash of anger. It seemed to be past now, leaving only a shaken look on Owen’s face and the swiftly fading traces of alarm on Jack’s.

   “Because I _am_ psi-sensitive,” said the Doctor. “Their defense mechanism would work very well indeed on me.”

   Gwen met dark brown eyes that were suddenly cold and alien and ancient, and shivered.

 ~~~

   About halfway through the assembly of the football-sized device which would apparently attract and contain a city-full of emotion-eaters, the Doctor informed Tosh that she had been very helpful, really she had, but it would probably be more efficient if he just worked on his own from now on. He was now sitting at the table in the conference room, bent over the contraption, his hair standing on end, his sonic screwdriver in hand, and a cup of tea at his elbow.

   Jack moved the tea, which he didn’t think the preoccupied Time Lord had noticed yet, out of spilling range.

   Other than the two them, the room was deserted. The others had scattered to do their paperwork out of hearing range of the Doctor’s mutters and occasional off-key humming. Which . . . he really couldn’t blame them for, he thought, as the Doctor began to sing ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ under his breath.

   He cleared his throat pointedly.

   “Mm?” asked the Doctor absently, slipping off his (entirely unnecessary) glasses.

   “So, Traxial IV.” Not the smoothest of introductions, but it worked. The Doctor stiffened and stopped his fiddling. “That was you, was it?”

   “Yes.” He sounded like he was going for cold and distant, but it came out more tired. Jack’s heart twisted in a way that only the Doctor could provoke.

   “Not that I blame you or anything, but I didn’t think you went in for vengeance.” Quite the opposite, in fact, Jack thought, recalling how the Doctor had cried over the Master’s body, having endured a solid year of torment in stoic silence only to shatter at the very end, to scream and sob and beg as his oldest friend, best enemy, last hope for absolution died in his arms . . . . _Damn, we never should have left him alone._

   So wrapped up in his memories, Jack almost missed the Doctor’s response.

   “I wasn’t the only one, Jack. There were others. Innocents. They didn’t deserve what was being done to them.”

   “Neither did you.” It was meant casually, almost flippantly, a statement of the obvious to fill space. The bitter smile and empty eyes with which the Doctor replied made Jack’s blood run cold.

   “Didn’t I?”

   Jack froze, his heart stuttering, waiting for any flicker, any sign that no, he didn’t, he _couldn’t_ – “You really believe that, don’t you?”

   The Doctor’s silence was answer enough.

   It took about three seconds for Jack to yank the Doctor to his feet, spin him around, and take hold of his shoulders. It took less than half that for the Doctor’s defenses to snap into place.

   “Doctor, _listen to me_ ,” he said, and he knew that his desperation was obvious in his voice and his grip, knew that he was nearly pleading, and didn’t care. The Doctor’s eyes met his, but they were shuttered, unreadable. “I’m not going to tell you that no one deserves what’s been done to you, because we’ve both met p – things that do.” A certain psychotic Time Lord came to mind, but he wasn’t sure the Doctor would agree with that assessment, so he modified his words to include Daleks as well. Even the Doctor might have conceded that one. “But Doctor – _you are not one of them._ ”

   The Doctor’s eyes skittered away from his, and he shook him, just a little, just to get his attention, and it felt wrong, impossibly thin shoulders under his own strong hands, but it was so, so important that he get his point across.

   “Doctor, _look at me_.”

   The Doctor’s eyes snapped back to meet his, and they were dark and hard and burning with such intensity that Jack couldn’t even tell what emotion it was; it might have been anger but it could just as easily have been guilt or pain or sorrow; and he refused to look away, because he was sure that if he stared long enough the inferno would give way to the real hurt and then maybe, maybe he’d be able to fix it – he heard the door open behind him, and the Doctor broke eye contact to shoot a warning look over his shoulder.

   The door snapped shut again, but the damage had been done. The moment was lost, and the Doctor broke away from his grip with less effort than Jack would have expected from a human of his build, but more than the Doctor would have needed had he been healthy. He righted the chair which had been knocked over when Jack pulled him out of it, and went back to work on his machine.

   “This should be done in a couple hours,” he said, his voice mild once again, and Jack wanted to hit something.

 ~~~

  They decided that it was best to spring the trap late at night, when there would be fewer people on the streets. Not that they would have suffered any particularly ill effects, beyond a momentary downturn in their mood, but they would like to avoid attracting attention to themselves. That left them with several hours to kill, and not much to do. Jack, surprisingly, had retreated to his office rather than hovering around the Doctor as he had been doing all day. The Doctor was using this opportunity to flit around the Hub, exclaiming over this and that and regaling them with tales of the exploits of his past (or future, depending on your perspective).

   It took Gwen longer than she liked to admit to notice that, while he gestured dramatically and enthralled them with stories of frozen worlds and dogs with no noses, alien artifacts (mostly unidentified) were disappearing from their desks. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t seem to catch him in the act, and, even more puzzlingly, she was _sure_ that some of the missing things could never have fit in his pockets.

   She shook herself and resolved to have a word with Jack later about his friends and their kleptomaniac tendencies. Also, to keep a closer eye on the Doctor’s clever fingers, rather than watching his expressive face as he described another alien wonder.

  When he finally slipped up, dropping a small power cell which he had been trying to slip into his pocket, it was because his hands were shaking too much to keep his grip.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack calls in the cavalry, Gwen is annoyed at his evasiveness, and Owen most definitely does not care (really. Not even a little.).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Apologies for my technobabble, which I’m sure is a horrendous affront to all things scientific.)

They were almost ready to set out. It was about midnight, the device was finished, and the Doctor was going over the controls with Tosh and Ianto one last time. Jack took advantage of his momentary distraction to call Martha.  
  
The phone rang once, twice before she picked up.  
  
“Jack,” she said, and her brisk, professional tone was so practiced that it hid nearly all of the worry in it. “What’s going on?”  
  
“Nice to talk to you too, Dr. Jones. I’m great; thanks for asking.”  
  
“Jack,” Martha sighed, exasperated and annoyed, but no longer anxious, “it’s nearly midnight, and I’ve had a long day. Why are you calling me?”  
  
“A mutual friend of ours just showed up at the Hub.” Well, not  _just_ , exactly, but he didn’t think that Martha would be too pleased if she found out that it had taken him eighteen hours to inform her of the Doctor’s arrival.  
  
There was a shocked silence on the other end of the phone, followed by several deep breaths.  
  
“Is he alright?” she asked finally, the professional tone dropping away and leaving concern in its wake.  
  
“Kind of,” said Jack, watching the Doctor as he explained something to Tosh, who was nodding along, perfectly comfortable with this strange alien whom she had known for less than a day. Ianto was still a bit edgy, but it seemed to be more on principal now than on account of any real hostility. The Doctor had that way with people.   
  
“Why, what happened?” Now there was a hint of real fear.   
  
“Nothing yet,” Jack reassured her.  _Well, not here, anyway_. “He’s acting pretty normal, actually. Running around the Hub, building world-saving whatsits out of iPods and chewing gum, giving my staff blackmail material . . . and I’m pretty sure he’s pocketing bits of our inventory.”  
  
“Sounds like him,” said Martha with a laugh which was only half forced. “So what’s the problem? You only sound that casual when something serious is going on.”  
  
“You know me too well, Dr. Jones.” He could almost  _hear_  her glare on the other side of the phone, and knew that he couldn’t put it off any longer. “The problem is that he’s acting normal and talking normally and says that he’s fine, but it’s all a mask. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week and hasn’t eaten in longer, and from what I’ve managed to gather about the past few days, that’s the least of his problems.”  
  
“Oh, God, Jack —” Her voice was full of horror and self-condemnation, and he knew exactly what she was thinking, because he had been thinking it all day.  
  
“Yeah, I know. I don’t want to tell you more over the phone, and we’ve got to take care of something here, but can you be here in a couple hours? I don’t want him running off again.”   
  
“Yes, of course, I’ll be there as soon as I can.  _Don’t_  let him leave.”  
  
“I won’t.”  
  
~~~  
  
Gwen and Jack were teamed up, patrolling around the edge of the Plass to turn away any late-night wanderers who may stumble across them. Tosh was ready to spring the trap, and Ianto was monitoring the sensors that would let them know when all the emotion-eaters were within range. Owen, much to his consternation, was back at the Hub with the Doctor, because Jack didn’t trust the alien on his own and Ianto was still tense around him.   
  
The night was warm, but Jack was still wearing his coat. It swished dramatically behind him as he strode around the perimeter at an unnecessarily quick rate. His brow was creased in thought, and Gwen was sure that his unusually silent mood had very little to do with the capturing of the emotion-eaters. As missions went, this one was actually fairly tame. No guns, no moral dilemmas, no chance of anyone dying. Just a few intergalactic pests to round up, and then home to bed.  
  
The line between Jack’s eyebrows wasn’t put there by the wearing, day-to-day worry of protecting the Earth from aliens, but by the more acute concern of protecting a certain alien from the Universe — or maybe from himself.   
  
“He’ll be alright, Jack,” she said, because it worried her when Jack wasn’t focused and because she wanted to believe it herself.  
  
Jack didn’t quite shake himself, but when he turned to her his trademark grin was back in place.  
  
“Who, Owen? I don’t know; he might be permanently scarred. I think he’s allergic to cheerfulness.”   
  
“I’m not talking about Owen.”  
  
His grin fell away, his jaw tightening, and he quickened his pace. She had to trot to keep up.  
  
“Jack —”  
  
“Don’t, Gwen!” he snapped over his shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”   
  
“Then explain it to me!” she demanded, because while she respected Jack and his privacy and whatever odd relationship he had with the Doctor, she was bloody sick of being kept in the dark. “No more secrets.”  
  
He stopped, jaw clenched, obviously trying to keep a grip on his temper.  
  
“They’re not my secrets to tell,” he said finally, through gritted teeth, before sweeping off again. Gwen jogged to catch up, feeling frustrated, but let it go. Whatever secrets the Doctor was keeping didn’t seem to be a danger to anyone but himself, and if Jack wanted to play personal therapist to a centuries-old alien than that was his business. Besides, if precedent held true, the Doctor would be off again as soon as the emotion-eaters were taken care of.  
  
She tried to ignore the twist in her heart at the thought of the man, friendly and helpful and obviously hurting, flying away in a rickety blue box, on his own.   
  
The comms crackled to life, and Tosh informed them that the first of the emotion-eaters had arrived. Jack and Gwen stilled, to avoid attracting attention and getting caught in the ‘defense mechanism,’ which, while not permanently damaging, would have been unpleasant. Within minutes the sensors said that the Plass was full of them, though Gwen couldn’t hear or see a thing.   
  
“Right, looks like that’s all of them,” said Ianto crisply.  
  
“Activating the trap,” Tosh responded, and from where they were standing Gwen could see a blue glow across the Plass.   
  
“It’s working,” said Ianto, sounding unsurprised. “They’re getting pulled in.”  
  
Gwen let out the breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Not that she had doubted the Doctor, exactly, but the machine looked more like something a twelve-year-old had pieced together in the local junkyard than a trap for formless aliens. Still, everything seemed to be going smoothly, as Ianto reported the steadily decreasing numbers. Not that it would have been all that terrible if the trap had failed: they’d just have taken it back to the Doctor for adjustments, and tried again.  
  
Gwen wished that all problems were this simple to fix.  
  
~~~  
  
Owen eyed the Doctor over his computer screen. The alien had started the story of Torchwood’s founding a while ago, and had managed to ramble his way into how many human myths were actually based off of alien activity (all of them, apparently). Owen had tuned him out half an hour ago, intent on playing some online poker, but now found himself watching the man — alien — closely. Not  _listening_ , mind, just watching.   
  
That was where all the truth was, anyway. If you just  _listened_  to the Doctor he would come off as perfectly fine; if a bit mad. Owen, however, was examining him with the trained eyes of both a doctor and an investigator, and every single one of his instincts was screaming ‘unwell.’ It wasn’t exactly difficult to see, once you got past the manic grin and energetic gestures. He was ridiculously thin, a fact which his brown pinstripes did very little to hide; he had tired circles under his eyes, standing out against his sickly-pale skin; and whenever his hands paused in their frantic motion they shook terribly.   
  
Owen was surprised he was still standing. Any human that obviously exhausted would have passed out hours ago.  
  
He briefly considered making him eat something — everyone else had been helping themselves to cold pizza and other questionable leftovers throughout the day, but all the Doctor had had were a few biscuits and some tea that Gwen had forced on him. It wasn’t that he  _cared_  or anything, but Jack would have his arse if the Doctor passed out and cracked his stupid head open while Owen was supposed to have been babysitting him. He decided against it. Alien biology and all, he probably had a completely different type of metabolism.   
  
Also, he couldn’t help but feel a bit wary of the man. Man, yes, for a certain value of the word, but definitely not human. Everyone else might have been feeling all warm and fuzzy towards him, what with his unfortunate resemblance to an underfed puppy, but Owen hadn’t forgotten that the Doctor was anything but harmless. Even if it had, momentarily, slipped his mind, he had received two jarring reminders that day: first, the sharp rebuke he had received that left him feeling as if he had been standing under a tree that was hit by lightning; second, the dark tempest that had been raging in the Doctor’s eyes when Owen walked in on . . . whatever that had been. Besides that, there was something skittish and desperate about the Doctor that would have kept Owen on alert even if he  _wasn’t_  dealing with an alien genius.  
  
Wounded animals were liable to snap at the people who approached them. Lost puppy or not, Owen was willing to bet that the Doctor had some very nasty teeth.  
  
~~~  
  
It was one-thirty by the time they got back to the Hub, and Ianto, who had been up since five, was just beginning to feel the first touches of fatigue. Normally, after saving Cardiff from aliens, he would have been coming down off of an enormous adrenaline high, but this particular mission had been extremely low-key.   
  
For a moment, he allowed himself to imagine that all of the Doctor’s adventures were like this. That the reason the Time Lord could maintain his moral high ground and his appearance of infallibility was because really, he didn’t face the kind of challenges that Torchwood did. Ianto’s logic caught up a moment later. He had spent far too long blaming the man for leaving death and destruction in his wake to start blaming him for not seeing enough of it. Besides that, the Doctor’s appearance of infallibility was all shot to hell at the moment.   
  
The Doctor bounded up to them as they entered — or tried to, anyway, but movements that were supposed to be bouncy and energetic were tempered by the unhealthy thinness of his frame and the way he stumbled halfway there.   
  
“Ianto!” he said as he straightened again, either oblivious to or ignoring the concerned looks that Gwen and Tosh shared. He was grinning, but his eyes were over-bright and his voice was tinged with something between hysteria and desperation. “Everything go alright, then?”  
  
“Yes, sir,” said Ianto. He wasn’t quite so stiff and awkward as he had been earlier, but he was not entirely comfortable with the Doctor either. He knew that Jack thought it was residual resentment on account of the Doctor’s involvement in the Battle of Canary Warf, or perhaps jealousy over Jack’s obvious infatuation, but he was only partly right. Canary Warf or no Canary Warf, the Doctor was a powerful alien and an unpredictable person. Ianto was fairly good at reading people, usually, and it bothered him that, despite the widening cracks, he couldn’t quite see what was behind the Doctor’s mask.  
  
The few glimpses he caught were enough to keep him from looking too hard.  
  
“No problems? None at all?” asked the Doctor, and his lack of protest at Ianto’s form of address was evidence of how eager he was to leave. “Good! I’ll just take that.” He snatched the device from Ianto’s hands. His fingers were like ice. “A few quick checks . . .” He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the trap. The way his hands were shaking, Ianto was amazed he didn’t drop it. “Yep, looks like everything’s in order. I’ll be off, then. Lovely meeting you all.”  
  
He was heading for the door before Ianto could think to stop him, or even decide whether he wanted to.   
  
~~~  
  
“Wait a sec, Doc,” said Jack, stepping into his path and holding up a hand, palm forward. The gesture, a combination of command and surrender and defense, was an instinctive response to the caged look that flashed across the Doctor’s face. He couldn’t let the Doctor leave, not in the state he was in, but the last thing he wanted was for the Time Lord to feel cornered.   
  
He had seen what happened when the Doctor was trapped. It usually ended in fire.  
  
“Leaving so soon?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully casual.  
  
“It is one thirty-eight in the morning,” said the Doctor, rocking back on his heels. He nearly fell, and Jack tensed for moment in anticipation, but he caught himself and covered for it with a sickly grin. “I know how you humans need your sleep. Wouldn’t want to keep you from it.”  
  
“You’re not keeping us from anything,” said Jack firmly. “I don’t sleep much, these days, and my team can go home whenever they want.” This sentence was aimed partly at said team, who were watching with varying degrees of concern, wariness, and impatience. They took the hint and began to gather their things to leave, Owen with a pointed efficiency and Gwen with more reluctance.   
  
“Yes, well.” The Doctor cleared his throat. One shaking hand went to the back of his neck in his habitual gesture of discomfort, but he pulled it back with a wince when his fingers brushed across the barely-healed scar. “I’ve got to get this lot back to where they belong,” he said, gesturing with the trap. “Stasis fields can be a bit dodgy . . . .”  
  
“Nice try,” said Jack. He thought about crossing his arms, but decided that even that mildly confrontational move would be counter-productive right now. “That thing’s hooked up to a self-renewing neutron loop. It will outlast the sun.”   
  
“Maybe I don’t want to hang about!” the Doctor snapped. Gwen — the only other Torchwood agent still around — looked startled at the sudden venom in his tone, but Jack was half-expecting the shield of anger that arose when shoddy excuses and brittle smiles failed. Coming from a twig-thin man who looked to be in the process of shaking himself to pieces, it wasn’t as intimidating as it might have been. Not that the Doctor couldn’t be fearsome — terrifying — when the occasion called, but this was just a hot, defensive anger, meant to distract more than to frighten.   
  
The Doctor was never as forceful in his own defense as in anyone else’s.   
  
“No, of course, sorry,” said Jack, with forced nonchalance, stepping back and allowing the Doctor to continue on his path towards the door. He only let the Time Lord go a few steps before he loosed his final weapon. “I get it. Busy life, moving on.”  
  
It was a low blow, especially with the Doctor as fragile as he was, and Jack knew it. But he was worried — terrified — that if he let the Doctor go now, he would never see him again — or if he did, it would be in a UNIT morgue.   
  
The Doctor flinched as though struck, and what little color he had drained out of his face. A few years ago, Jack would have given anything to see the Doctor looking haunted and shattered like this, but now he just felt sick.  
  
“C’mon, Doc,” he said gently, laying a cautious hand on a shaking shoulder. The Doctor tensed, but didn’t pull away. “Stay. Just for a bit. Martha’s on her way; she’ll have my head if she doesn’t get to see you.”  
  
“Why?” asked the Doctor, turning back towards him, and Jack’s stomach lurched at the sheer self-loathing in his eyes. “After everything that happened — why would she want to see me?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Martha very firmly keeps her head, Jack maybe loses his just a little, and there is some question as to the stability of the Doctor’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Contains a quotes from ‘Evolution of the Daleks,’ ‘Family of Blood,’ and, indirectly, ‘Last of the Time Lords.’)

Martha’s drive to Cardiff was a long one. Her mind kept running through nightmare scenarios, despite her attempts to remain calm and rational. From what Jack had said when he called her, the Doctor was upright and talking and healthy enough to fake a smile. That wasn’t terribly reassuring, but it at least meant that he hadn’t managed to get himself killed or seriously injured. 

Yet, murmured a little voice at the back of her head, reminding her of Jack’s words that they had needed to ‘take care of something’ at Torchwood when she had called. It was the same little voice that kept bringing up all the reasons she never should have left him: the desperation in his eyes behind his encouraging smile as he saw her off, the obvious damage that the Year and the Master’s death had done to him, his penchant for self-destruction. . . .

She shivered at the memory of his voice, harsh with grief and fury and hopelessness, demanding his own death.

“Alright, so it’s my turn! Then kill me!”

“Just do it! Do it!”

Her grip tightened on the wheel. She had done the right thing. She had. Maybe not for the Doctor, but for herself and for her family. The Doctor was and always had been too far gone for her to heal, and while that was neither his fault nor hers, she had needed to focus on what she could fix. It was a long, painful process, but the majority of her family’s (and her own) wounds were beginning to scar over by now, and she was more than ready to help Jack with whatever damage control they could manage with the Doctor.

With that thought in mind (and desperately hoping that it was true), she pulled up to the Plass in Cardiff. It took her a few minutes to find her way to the visitor’s entrance of Torchwood, and a few more to find the button that Jack had told her about ‘just in case.’ She watched the door slide open and walked through it with a degree of wry amusement — really, it was so very Jack, a secret panel leading to an ominous stone corridor leading to an underground government agency — and froze abruptly as she heard the click of a safety being released next to her ear.

“Who are you?” demanded a Welsh, female voice.

“I’m Dr. Martha Jones,” she replied, as evenly as she could, raising her hands cautiously and shooting a glance at her confronter. It was a pretty, dark-haired, pale woman, eyeing her with suspicion but not panic or undue rage. Martha could work with that. “Jack called me.”

“Why?” asked the woman, not lowering her weapon.

“Because I’m a friend of the Doctor’s.” 

The woman hesitated, then pulled back and holstered her gun. Martha relaxed, letting out the breath she had been holding.

“Sorry about that,” said the woman with a grimace. “Jack didn’t tell me you were coming.” Something about her tone implied that this lack of communication wasn’t unusual. “Gwen Cooper, Torchwood.”

“Nice to meet you, Agent Cooper,” said Martha, taking the proffered hand. “I take it you’ve met the Doctor, then?”

“Yes, I have,” said Cooper, and the troubled look that flashed across her face was not reassuring in the least. “He’s down there with Jack,” she added, gesturing over her shoulder. “Or at least, I hope they’re both still down there — they were having a bit of a go at each other when I left.”

“Right,” said Martha, unable to decide whether to be worried or glad that the Doctor was intact enough to be infuriating. “Thank you. Do I need any passwords or anything to get down . . . ?” 

“Here,” said Cooper, turning and entering a code next to the steel door. “That should clear your way down.”

“Thanks,” said Martha sincerely, stepping into the lift.

“Yeah,” replied Cooper, with a friendly half-smile. “Good luck.”

Martha nodded and forced a smile of her own in reply before the door shut. The lift slid smoothly into motion, and when it settled at the bottom and opened again, she was distracted from the fairly spectacular (but also disappointingly dark and damp) view by two very familiar voices.

First Jack’s, and it was cautious and gentle in a way she rarely heard from him, the sort of tone usually reserved for wounded animals and traumatized children.

“Martha’s on her way; she’ll have my head if she doesn’t get to see you.”

Then the Doctor’s, and her heart skipped a beat despite herself before plummeting as she registered the tone and content of his words.

“Why? After everything that happened — why would she want to see me?”

“Because I care about you,” said Martha, stepping out of the (extremely elaborate) doorway and into view. The Doctor jumped terribly, only Jack’s grip on his arm keeping him steady. 

Well, steady relatively speaking. Even from where she stood Martha could see that he was trembling. 

“Hey there, Mister,” she said with small but sincere smile as she approached. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah,” said the Doctor, almost inaudibly, his dark eyes sliding away from hers. His words to Jack only moments ago had been raw and vulnerable, but now he had retreated behind his all-too-familiar barrier of distance. Martha’s concern was swiftly turning to alarm as she took in how thin he really was, just how badly he was shaking.

“So, what are you doing here?” she asked, noticing the way his eyes kept flickering towards the door and placing herself firmly in his way. “Since I’m guessing this isn’t a social visit.”

“No, well.” He cleared his throat awkwardly and gestured with the gadget he was holding, a haphazard conglomeration of wires and blinking lights. “There was a small infestation of affectavores. All cleaned up, now — well, mostly, and I should really be getting this lot back to Regulus III—”

“Not a chance,” said Martha sharply, catching the Doctor’s arm as he tried to slip past her. He flinched away from her touch, the gadget clattering to the ground as he lost his tremulous grip. “I only just got here; you’re not taking off yet.” 

“Martha . . .”

“Face it, Doc, you’re outnumbered,” said Jack, coming to stand at Martha’s shoulder.

Something flashed across the Doctor’s face, an instinctive reaction to being cornered — for an instant he was dark and forbidding and utterly inhuman, every inch fire and ice and rage — and then it was gone. He sank onto the couch behind him, his face in his hands, looking as exhausted and battered and broken as every other lonely widower and battle-worn veteran whom Martha had ever met. 

“Doctor, I promise, we just want to help,” she said softly, sitting down next to him and laying a hand on his (far too bony) shoulder. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Tea,” muttered the Doctor, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “There were biscuits.”

“That was today,” Jack confirmed. “Gwen made him eat a few Jammy Dodgers.” 

“And before that?” asked Martha, directing her question towards the Doctor even as she nodded her thanks to Jack and felt a rush of warmth towards Agent Cooper.

“Dunno.” The Doctor gave a large sigh and rubbed a hand down his face. “A few days ago? Maybe a week. Definitely not more than a fortnight.” 

“We’ve got some leftover pizza,” said Jack, not even giving Martha a chance to ask. She smiled gratefully at him before turning back to the Doctor, who still wasn’t looking at her, his body hunched forward defensively and his eyes fixed on the floor.

He was withdrawing. It was better than his earlier attempts at physical flight, but she would have to find a way to make him talk — really talk, not just give her the factual information she asked for. 

But first, they had to make sure that he didn’t pass out.

“When did you sleep last? Proper sleep, not getting knocked unconscious or dozing off for a couple minutes,” she added when he opened his mouth. He closed it again.

“Three and a half weeks,” he said after a moment, his voice flat.

“And you normally need . . . what, a few hours a week?” she questioned, looking to him for confirmation. He merely nodded silently in reply, and she was distracted from pressing for more by Jack’s return. 

“I’m afraid we’ve only got veggie left,” said Jack, his customary grin and jovial tone not quite managing to hide the worry in his eyes. “Tosh is the only one who eats it; can’t stand it myself.”

“That’s fine, isn’t it, Doctor?” she asked, making a conscious effort to speak normally, without condescension or coddling. “You probably need the vitamins.” 

The Doctor gave a half-hearted shrug, but accepted the pizza box from Jack and began to eat. That was good, at least — it suggested that he had simply been forgetting about food, rather than intentionally starving himself. He wolfed down two slices with surprising speed, but hesitated as he reached for a third.

“Better not,” he said dully, pulling back and closing the box. “Wouldn’t be smart to eat too much yet.”

“Of course,” agreed Martha with an approving nod, pleased that he was engaged enough to check himself. “You should eat something more in the morning, but first, you are going to bed, Mister.”

“Never thought I’d see the day when I got you into my bed, Doc,” said Jack with his trademark leer as the Doctor rose shakily. He swayed a bit, and Martha had to resist the urge to steady him (even as compliant as he had been so far, she didn’t think he would appreciate it). 

“Stop it,” the Doctor snapped, with an irritated glare. 

His annoyance might have been amusing if not for how distressingly frail he looked beside Jack’s broad form. 

~~~

The Doctor had fallen asleep almost before he hit the pillow, curling in on himself as Martha and Jack moved back into Jack’s office. Jack now regarded Martha from where he stood against his desk, hands in his pockets and a tight knot of worry in his chest.

“Right, then,” she said. Her tone was purposeful, her expression collected, but Jack could see the weariness in her posture and the worry in her eyes. “You said he told you something about the past few days?”

“More like my team forced it out of him,” said Jack with a grimace. “But, yeah. He said he was captured on Taxial IV’s moon.”

“Does that mean something?”

“It had already been destroyed by my time, but it was covered in research facilities before that. They were notorious for the nasty things they did to their test subjects.”

“Let me guess,” Martha sighed. “He ended up a test subject?”

“Yep,” said Jack grimly. “And of course he refused to cooperate — so they cut him open and prodded at the pain center of his brain.”

“Oh, god,” said Martha, bringing up a hand to cover her mouth, staring at him with wide-eyed horror. “That’s — how did he escape?”

“I didn’t ask,” said Jack with a shrug. “All I know is that they had him for three days, and after he got out he teleported all the other test subjects down to the planet’s surface and threw the moon into the sun.”

“And then he came right here?” asked Martha.

“Yeah. He was tracking some psychic anomalies — don’t worry; we took care of them, like he said. But look, him getting tortured isn’t the worst of it.” 

Martha shot him an alarmed look, and he continued before she had to ask.

“I tried to talk to him about it, and — he practically said that he deserved it.”

“What?!” exclaimed Martha shrilly. Jack hushed her quickly, shooting a glance at the entrance to his room, and her next words were quieter, but no less shocked and indignant. “He can’t honestly think —”

“He does,” Jack snapped, his jaw tightening as he remembered the hollowness in the Doctor’s eyes. “I don’t know why — could be the Master, or that year, or his planet, or all of it — but the Doctor thinks he deserves any shit that happens to him.”

“But he doesn’t,” protested Martha, her eyes bright with tears she wouldn’t let fall. “Everything he’s done — everyone he’s saved — what happened in that year wasn’t his fault! It was the Master, all of it!”

“Did you tell him that?”

“I — well, no, not in so many words —”

“Neither did I,” sighed Jack. “It didn’t even occur to me that he would blame himself. Or maybe it did, but I was distracted — but I should have known,” he hissed, turning away, fighting the urge to punch something. “He’s always had this guilt complex, even before he regenerated; I should have known better than to let him run off after something like that.”

“Maybe,” said Martha from behind him, in that firm, compassionate voice of hers. “Maybe we should have helped him more — but we had other things to deal with at the time, and we both did the best we could. We can’t always be expected to support him.”

“Then who else is going to?” snarled Jack, spinning around, too full of worry and anger (at himself, at the Master, at the Universe) to modulate his tone. “We’re all he has, Martha! If we don’t —”

“Quiet!” barked Martha suddenly, holding up a hand. Jack, startled, fell silent. “Do you hear that?”

Jack listened.

“Oh, shit . . . .”

He was down the ladder in an instant, Martha right at his heels. The Doctor was a quivering ball in the center of the cot, sobbing quietly in his sleep. 

“Doctor?” Jack said cautiously, reaching out to lay a hand on his shuddering shoulder. “C’mon, Doc, wake up.”

The Doctor’s only response was to shrink away from his touch as stronger sobs wracked his thin frame.

“He’s not going to wake up,” said Martha. “He’s too exhausted; his body won’t let him.”

“So what do we do?” asked Jack desperately, his stomach twisting as the Doctor began to whimper and beg.

“No, please, please don’t, don’t hurt them . . .”

“Shh,” Martha soothed, running a gentle hand through his hair. She looked on the verge tears herself, but when she spoke her voice was admirably steady. “It’s alright. It’s alright, Doctor; it’s just a dream. Everyone’s safe.”

“No,” the Doctor moaned. “No, I swear, I didn’t see her!”

Martha froze, pulling away, and Jack was sure that she was seeing the exact same thing he was: the Doctor sobbing over the man who had made their lives a living hell for a solid year, begging him to live. At the loss of contact the Doctor folded in on himself further, his voice becoming even more desperate as his pleas changed.

“I’m sorry; I’m so sorry; please, don’t leave me alone, not again . . .”

“Oh, Doctor,” Martha whispered, tears beginning to streak down her own face as she returned to stroking his hair. She looked stricken, and Jack felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. Of all the things that could give the Doctor nightmares, he had never expected to be one of them. “I’m here; you’re not alone.”

“Me too, Doc,” said Jack through his suddenly tight throat, pulling one of the Doctor’s slender, icy hands towards him and enfolding it in both his own, in an attempt to offer the comfort and warmth which the Doctor seemed to be in such desperate need of. “We’re not going anywhere, I promise.” 

The Doctor gradually calmed, his voice losing strength and his shudders fading to the occasional twitch. When he finally fell back into a peaceful slumber, Jack looked up to find Martha’s eyes mirroring his own pain and fear. 

“Jack, what are we going to do?”

Jack glanced down at the pale, worn face of his sleeping friend. Huddled in on himself and clinging to Jack’s hand even in sleep, the Doctor looked as fragile and vulnerable as a traumatized child.

“I don’t know.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor refuses to answer anything properly, Torchwood has things that they shouldn’t, and Martha plays mediator. (What else is new?)

When Martha woke up, there was a moment of disorientation. Slowly, the events of the previous night trickled back to her — Jack’s phone call, her tense drive to Cardiff, the discovery of the Doctor on the verge of a psychological breakdown, and finally Jack’s insistence that she at least try to get some sleep. She hadn’t thought she would be able to, what with her consuming worry for the Doctor, but it  _had_  been a long day, and she had drifted off to sleep not long after settling onto opposite side of Jack’s bed. At least, she  _had_  been on the opposite side . . . now she seemed to be pressed against something cool and bony.   
  
Suddenly wide awake, she jerked upright with a strangled curse and tumbled out of the bed. When she recovered enough to get her bearings, she found Jack perched on the edge of the bed, watching her amusedly.   
  
“Morning,” he said, and though his tone was quiet, to avoid waking the still-sleeping Doctor, his grin was as wicked as ever. “Pleasant dreams?”  
  
“What time is it?” she asked, in lieu of dignifying that question with a response.   
  
“Oh nine hundred hours,” said Jack, the smile fading from his face as he glanced down at their friend. “I’ve never seen him sleep so long.”  
  
“Well, he needs it,” Martha sighed, coming to sit next to him on the bed. “Has he had any more nightmares?”  
  
“A couple, but not as bad as before. He was the one who moved closer to you, actually,” said Jack with a small, tight smile. “He reacted badly if I tried to separate you.”  
  
Indeed, the Doctor was noticing Martha’s absence, squirming and whimpering in his sleep.   
  
“Hey,” she said softly, grasping his hand and gently brushing his hair away from his forehead. “It’s okay, Doctor; I’m here.”  
  
Dark brown eyes blinked open. For a moment, they were utterly unguarded — lost and hurting and lonely, drowning in guilt and exhausted in more ways than just physically — but then the Doctor’s walls snapped back into place, and they went blank.  
  
“Hello, Martha,” he said as he sat up. “Captain. You two haven’t been up all night, have you?”  
  
For a moment, Martha wanted to ask how he knew that it was morning, considering that they were in a windowless room, but she stopped herself just in time. _Not human_ , she reminded herself. She would need to get used to that again.   
  
“Martha slept,” Jack was answering, his tone sober and his expression unusually serious, much to her relief. It would do no good to have him encouraging the Doctor’s defensive flippancy. “Like I said last night, I don’t really need to.”  
  
“How about you?” asked Martha, pulling the Doctor’s attention back to her. “How are you feeling? And don’t even think about saying ‘fine,’ or any variation thereof, because I know you better than that.”  
  
“Better, actually. No, really!” he added in response to Martha’s skeptical look. “I’d forgotten what a good night’s sleep could do. I’m a bit hungry, though — you wouldn’t happen to have anything besides cold pizza?”  
  
His voice was convincingly cheerful, but his smile was just as empty as his eyes. It seemed that a good night’s sleep hadn’t repaired anything but the Doctor’s shields.   
  
“Is there any place to get breakfast around here?” she asked Jack, who was watching the exchange with a small frown that told her he had seen the same thing she had.   
  
“Yeah,” he said, standing. “There’s a great little place just around the corner. The waitress knows me,” he added with a wink.   
  
“Brilliant,” said the Doctor happily, with a bright, brittle grin. “It’s been ages since I was kicked out of anywhere.”   
  
~~~  
  
Jack kept half an eye on the Doctor as he chattered enthusiastically at Martha, but most of his attention was focused on Gina as she made her rounds to the tables.   
  
Jack hadn’t been lying when he said he knew the waitress — in fact, he had gotten her the job, after her escape pod had crashed outside of Cardiff a few years ago. Gina — or Her Highness Tepalaginiad II, exiled princess of Fitali, to be strictly accurate — was the main reason that Jack had suggested this particular café. Along with being a shape-shifter, a beautiful woman, and an all-around delightful person, Gina was a highly accomplished empath — accomplished enough to slip past the Doctor’s shields without even trying. If anyone would be able to tell him what was really going on in the Doctor’s head, it would be her.  
  
Sure enough, her step faltered slightly as she approached their table, her eyes flickering to the Doctor for an instant before settling back on Jack.   
  
“Good morning,” she greeted.  
  
“It is now, beautiful,” he replied, with his most charming grin.  
  
“Jack Harkness, if you can’t control your tongue I will rip it out and feed it to you. What d’you want?”  
  
Alright, so maybe ‘delightful’ was a bit of an exaggeration.   
  
“That’s  _Captain_  Jack Harkness. And I’ll take the usual, Gina.”  
  
“I ain’t seen no ship,  _Captain_. What about you two?” she asked, turning to the other two occupants of the table. Jack would never have expected Gina to flinch for anything less than a nuclear explosion, but he swore he saw a wince when she met the Doctor’s eyes.   
  
Martha and the Doctor ordered, and Gina swept off again with the warning that “it might be a bit; Joey’s got a hangover again.” After a few minutes of shooting glances at their table when the Doctor wasn’t looking, she was back.  
  
“Harkness, a word.”  
  
Jack allowed himself to be dragged around the corner and into a small enclave by the restrooms.   
  
“Why, Gina, if you were interested you just had to ask.”  
  
“Shut it. I want to know just what the hell you’re playing at.” She emphasized her words with a prod to his chest. He winced as her long nail (suddenly much sharper than a human one) dug into his skin.   
  
“Not playing at anything. I just need your opinion, that’s all.”  
  
“On your friend in the suit, am I right?” She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing hotly. “You want me to go prancing around in his brain and tell you what I find. Well I can tell you right now,  _Captain_  Jack Harkness, that ain’t gonna happen. I’m not one of your pretty little agents; I don’t gotta jump when you tell me to.”  
  
“Look, I’m not asking you to go digging around,” said Jack, dropping all pretence. “You’ve obviously picked up something already; I just need to know what that is.”  
  
Gina regarded him suspiciously for a moment.  
  
“This is important to you,” she said at last, and it wasn’t a question. “Why?”  
  
“He’s my friend,” sighed Jack. With Gina, honesty was really only option. “I’m worried about him. All I want to do is help, I swear, but I can’t do that unless I know what’s really going.”  
  
Gina eyed him for another few moments, and seemed to judge him truthful.  
  
“You’re right to be worried,” she said at last, backing off a few steps and folding her arms across her chest. “I’ve been in some fucked up minds — yours included — but your friend wins the grand prize.” She shuddered, her eyes going distant. “No one who’s screaming that loud should have so much silence in his head.” Her gaze snapped back to the present, suddenly pinning him with a burning gaze. “You wanna know what’s really going on, sweet cheeks? Your friend is dying from the inside out. That paper-thin smile of his is all the life he’s got left. When that collapses, so does he.”  
  
She turned on her heel before he could recover himself enough to respond.   
  
~~~  
  
A good night’s sleep and a decent meal may have strengthened the Doctor’s mask for a while, but by the time they were heading back to Torchwood his cheerful façade was deteriorating. When they finally made it into to Hub (empty, on Jack’s orders) he was looking caged again, his bouncy steps faltering and his eyes darting about edgily.   
  
To preempt any attempts at flight, Martha slipped around him and scooped up the gadget he had dropped the other night.   
  
“Jack, could you find someplace safe for this? We probably shouldn’t leave it lying about.”   
  
“Sure,” the Captain answered, with a grateful, approving look that said he knew what she was doing. “It’ll be secure in the safe.”   
  
The Doctor deflated a bit, confirming Martha’s suspicion that he had been planning to use the ‘psychic anomalies’ (whatever that meant) as an excuse to run off again. With that escape route cut off, he moved over to one of the desks, instead, pretending to be preoccupied with whatever he was doing on the computer.   
  
“So . . .” she said, coming up behind him and glancing over his shoulder. He was going through some file or another, but she couldn’t keep up with his speed-reading. “Interesting read?”  
  
“Only if you find Torchwood’s gross incompetence interesting,” said the Doctor contemptuously. “What ever happened to ‘know your enemy’?  _UNIT_  has better files than this, and I was only a consultant to them.”  
  
“. . . . those are  _your_  files?” asked Martha, after taking a moment to puzzle out his predictably round-about answer.   
  
“Yep.” There was something of his customary pop in the P, but it wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as usual. “They didn’t even catch on to the fact that I was stranded here for the better part of the eighties — or was it the seventies?”  
  
“How did that happen, then?”  
  
“It’s a long story.” His rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, drawing her attention to the scar just below his collar. She remembered what Jack had told her the night before, and felt sick. The Doctor continued, gaze fixed on the computer, not noticing her unease. “The TARDIS was disabled for a while, so I consulted for UNIT for a bit. Blimey, that was a  _long_  time ago.”  
  
Martha was just about to ask how long ago, exactly (though she would probably get only a vague answer), when Jack’s voice echoed down the stairs.   
  
“Hey Doc, feel like dazzling us?”  
  
“ _Jack_  . . .”  
  
“Relax, I just found something that we haven’t been able to identify. I’d forgotten about it, but I figured you might have some clue what it is. Though,” added Jack with a leer as he strode towards them, “if you know another definition of ‘dazzle’ . . .”   
  
The Doctor rolled his eyes and snatched the object from Jack’s hand, slipping on his glasses. To Martha, it didn’t look like anything terribly significant — just a metal cube, with a rather tempting black button in the middle of one side. The Doctor, however, went white as a sheet and dropped the cube onto the desk as though it had burned him.  
  
“Doctor —?”  
  
“Where did you get this?” the Doctor asked, his voice oddly detached.   
  
“It fell through the Rift a few weeks ago.”  
  
“Did you press the button?”  
  
“What?”   
  
“ _Did you press the button_?” the Doctor demanded, rounding on Jack, his eyes burning.   
  
“I — yeah, but it didn’t do anything,” said Jack, taking a step back.   
  
“You  _pressed_  it,” snarled the Doctor, spinning around again. He whipped off his glasses and began to pace, digging both hands into his hair. “Of  _course_  you did; stupid, idiotic humans, give you a cliff and you jump off it just to see what will happen —”  
  
“We’re not idiots!” Jack snapped, drawing himself up to his full height and glaring at the Doctor. “We scanned it first to make sure it wasn’t dangerous —”  
  
“ _Not dangerous_?” growled the Time Lord, countering Jack’s threatening pose with his own. Jack’s broader shoulders and better health suddenly seemed like much less of an advantage in the face of the Doctor’s near-tangible fury. “Do you have any idea what that could have done?”  
  
“What  _is_  it, Doctor?” asked Martha, cutting across his tirade before Jack could respond in kind.   
  
“It doesn’t matter,” he snapped, snatching it up again. “All you need to know it that it is very, very dangerous, and should not, under any circumstances, be mucked about with by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Now if you don’t mind —”  
  
He stormed past them, ignoring Martha’s attempt to catch his arm, and retrieved his coat from where it had been left draped over the sofa. Martha followed him up the stairs, Jack on her heels, but she couldn’t think of a way to stop him as he swept towards the door.  
  
“ _I_ , for one, have better places to be than a sewer in Cardiff. Lovely seeing you again Martha, Jack, but I think it’s time I was off.” He reached for something in his inside pocket, and froze. Slowly at first, then with frantic urgency, he dug into each of his pockets in turn.  
  
“Lost something?” asked Jack. Both Martha and the Doctor spun to look at him. He was leaning against the doorframe to his office, arms folded across his chest.  
  
“Jack,” said the Doctor slowly, with icy calm. “Where is my sonic screwdriver?”  
  
“In the safe, with your TARDIS key,” Jack replied evenly. His lips quirked into a smirk, a touch of amusement entering his voice. “I went through your pockets last night. You do realize that you have three years worth of candy wrappers in there?”  
  
The Doctor didn’t smile.  
  
“You can’t keep me here.”  
  
Jack’s smirk faded, his gaze turning sad and serious.  
  
“I know. You’re not a prisoner, Doc; I’ll give your stuff back if you ask. You can fly off again, go back to fighting the fight and making the hard decisions — alone. But I don’t think you want that anymore than we do.” Jack was just a few steps away, now, closer to the Doctor than Martha was. The Doctor was standing his ground, tension still in his stance, but his anger was just as brittle as his happiness, and it was already beginning to crack.  
  
“Doctor, please,” said Martha, coming to stand at Jack’s shoulder. “Stay. Let us help.”  
  
All the rage seemed to drain out of him, leaving darkness in his eyes where there had been flames. His face went blank, and when he spoke his voice was flat and emotionless.  
  
“It’s a Paradox Bomb.”  
  
“. . . What?” asked Jack, looking just as lost as Martha felt.  
  
“The cube. It’s a Paradox Bomb. It must have been disabled, but usually when the button is pressed, it sends out an electro-magnetic pulse that instantly kills everyone in the vicinity — except for whoever is holding the bomb. A few moments later, it sends the holder a minute or so back in time, to before the pushed the button, and creates a temporal loop which keeps resetting until they stop themselves from pressing it.”  
  
“But that’s a paradox,” said Jack with a frown. “If they hadn’t pressed it, they’d have never set off the time loop.”   
  
“Exactly. The combination of crossed timelines and a paradox brings the Reapers. They clear the planet of sentient life forms and leave the natural resources intact.”   
  
Martha hadn’t understood all the details of the explanation — she could guess what ‘time loop’ meant, but she had no idea what Reapers were— but she knew enough to get the general idea. The device which sat so innocuously on the desk was engineered specifically to trick some innocently curious person into destroying their own planet, leaving it open for habitation by whoever had planted the bomb in the first place.  
  
“Who would design something like that?” she asked, her voice laced with horror and disgust.   
  
The Doctor’s eyes slid shut, but not before she saw the utter desolation in them.  
  
“I did.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things get (more) emotional, and the chapter is short so as not to ruin the feel of the thing.

Martha was momentarily speechless with shock and horror, so it was Jack who asked the obvious question.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“The Time War,” said the Doctor, in the same disconnected voice as before. “There was this planet — it was peaceful, benign, but it had vast mineral deposits just under the surface. If the Daleks had gotten it, it would have all been over, but if we could somehow take it without destroying it, there was a chance. Romana was already —” He stopped, swallowed hard before continuing. “I was the only one who knew enough about lower species, except the —” He cut himself off again, throat working.  
  
Martha waited patiently for him to regain his voice, while some distant part of her mind laughed bitterly at the irony of the Doctor not even being able to say the monster’s name.  
  
“Well, no one was fool enough to let  _him_  design a weapon. It was going to happen anyway — We couldn’t let the Daleks have it. We would have used a supernova if we had to, but then all those resources would have been lost — they were going to engineer a plague, but that was cruel. Messy. So I — I designed a quicker way. More efficient.”   
  
He met her eyes. His jaw was taut, his expression cold, his eyes distant and perilous — but that was just another mask, as much as the smiles or the glares. A part of her wanted to let him drive her away, as he was so obviously trying to do. The tiny piece of youth and idealism that had survived the Year That Never Was recoiled instinctively at the destruction he was confessing to have caused, and the part that still smarted from unrequited love wanted to leave him to the distance which he clung to like a security blanket. A much, much bigger part of her wanted to wrap him in her arms and never let go.  
  
She compromised.  
  
“Is that you trying to scare us off?” she asked, meeting his gaze unwaveringly. “Because it’s not going to work.”  
  
“She’s right,” said Jack, clapping a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. He was beginning to tremble again, crumbling as his last defense failed. “We’re your friends, Doc. We’re not going anywhere.”  
  
The Doctor gave a strangled sound, and dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.  
  
~~~  
  
Jack caught the Doctor as he crumpled.  
  
“Whoa, Doc. Easy.”  
  
The Doctor shuddered in his arms, but didn’t respond.  
  
“C’mon, Doc,  _breathe_.”  
  
A ragged breath, and then another. Harsh, choking gasps, as if there wasn’t room for oxygen with all the guilt and pain and grief.  
  
“There we go,” he said, as Martha sighed in relief. He began to rub his friend’s shuddering back in slow, calming circles. Gradually, the Doctor’s breathing slowed, his eyes focusing on Jack’s hand where it grasped his arm supportively.   
  
“Jack?”  
  
“Hey, Doc. Alright?” It was a stupid question, and he expected an equally stupid answer — like one of the Doctor’s customary assertions that he was always alright. Instead, the Doctor gave a sound between a whimper and a sob and pulled away, scrambling backwards until he was pressed against the wall.   
  
“It’s my fault, Jack.” His voice was thick with guilt, his shaking form impossibly frail. “All of it. The War and Gallifrey and the Master —”  
  
“What the Master did was not your fault,” Jack said firmly, edging towards him cautiously, holding up a hand to keep Martha where she was. He didn’t want to overwhelm the Doctor if he could help it. “He was a monster, insane.”  
  
“But not always, not like that. Not before the War, before Gallifrey —”  
  
“That wasn’t your fault either,” said Jack, gently, carefully, easing closer. “Living when someone else dies isn’t the same as killing them.” It had taken him a long, long time to learn that lesson, but he had, eventually.  
  
The Doctor laughed, choking and hysterical.   
  
“Oh, but I did kill them. Pressed a button and watched the world burn. I killed whole species to keep the War going, and then I killed my own to end it.”  
  
Jack froze in his slow approach, hearing Martha gasp behind him.  _Oh, god_. He had known that the Doctor had fought in the biggest war in Creation, had done and seen things that Jack couldn’t even begin to imagine, but  _this_  —   
  
“You see what I am, Jack?  _I’m_  the monster. I’m the killer of my own kind, the Destroyer of Worlds.” The Doctor’s eyes were on his, now, and weren’t burning anymore. They were drowning. Jack could see the real hurt, but he had no idea how to fix it, how to repair a man who had been broken so many times that he was only held together by the quickly-fading shreds of hope. “I destroyed my planet and my people — my  _people_ , Jack, my  _family_. I’ve ruined so many lives — yours and Martha’s and Rose’s and I don’t even know how many others. I couldn’t save Astrid, couldn’t fix the Master — I try to help, Jack, I do, but everything I touch turns to dust, and I can’t — I can’t —”  
  
The Doctor’s words dissolved into wracking sobs, spurring Jack into action. He was at the Time Lord’s side in an instant, wrapping his arm around too-thin shoulders, threading a hand through limp hair. The Doctor leaned into his touch, pressing his face into his neck and  _clinging_ , cold tears soaking through Jack’s shirt and raising goose bumps on his skin.   
  
Martha joined them at his nod and sat down on the Doctor’s other side. She took his hand and murmured to him, soft, soothing nothings; empty platitudes for an empty man. Slowly, slowly, his harsh sobs faded to quiet weeping, his weeping to whimpers. Finally he sat between them, huddled into Jack’s warmth, silent and still.   
  
Eventually, he shifted slightly and gave a small sigh, cool air blowing against Jack’s neck.  
  
“Doctor?” asked Jack softly. There was no response. Martha moved around to the front of them.  
  
“He’s asleep,” she whispered, watching the Doctor with a fond, sad smile. “We should probably move him somewhere more comfortable.”  
  
“No arguments from me,” said Jack with a grimace, rolling his free shoulder and wincing at the cacophony of pops and cracks. He extracted himself from the Doctor’s grip, just enough so that he could scoop him up with an arm under his knees and another behind his shoulders. He was far lighter than he should have been.   
  
Jack would never be able to get down the ladder without waking the Doctor, so he set him down on the sofa, as gently as he could. The Doctor grumbled indistinctly as Jack stepped back, but didn’t wake.  
  
Martha stayed beside the Doctor. She reached out a hand as if to brush the hair away from his forehead, but hesitated and pulled back.   
  
“He looks so small,” she said. “Most of the time he’s so . . . big. Larger than life. It’s easy to forget that he’s just a person.”  
  
She was right. Jack had seen the Doctor look like everything from a mad scientist to an avenging angel, but it shook him to the core to see him like this, skinny and pale and curled in on himself like a frightened child. Every mask was stripped away — the Doctor was no longer the infallible righter of wrongs, the omniscient holder of answers, or the perpetually wonder-filled lover of the Universe. He was just the Doctor: the last of his kind, bleeding and broken and so, so tired.  
  
He had given everything he had to save them, time and time again. They had saved his life too, but now, when the threat was from his own demons rather than a gun or a bomb or a megalomaniac, when the consequence of failure was a slow fade rather than a sudden death — now could be their last chance to save  _him_. 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are three oblique references to other TV shows, a new member is added to the Doctor’s Angels, and the Fourth Wall gets, if not broken, at least slightly cracked.

Martha sat beside the couch, in a chair which she had borrowed from one of the desks, watching the Doctor as he slept. Jack had run out on Torchwood business (promising to pick up lunch for them all), and she was left to watch over the Universe’s watchman. Every once in a while he began to sob and whimper in his sleep; painful, pitiful sounds which broke Martha’s heart with every twitch and cry. He quieted again when she soothed him with soft words and gentle touches, and didn’t wake.   
  
It was so unfair.  
  
That was all she could think as she looked at him, the man who had saved so many people, so many times, the man who now shivered on a ratty couch beneath his coat, looking pale and exhausted and underfed.   
  
It was so bloody unfair, that someone could give and give and give until they were empty and broken, and receive nothing but pain in return. The Doctor was not perfect by any means, not omniscient, not infallible — he could be arrogant, oblivious, cold, even cruel — but everything he did was for the good of other people, of the Universe. He had never done anything to deserve what had happened to him.  _No one_  deserved what had happened to him.  
  
She was jolted out of her thoughts by her mobile ringing, the sound unnaturally loud in the gloomy silence of the Hub. She answered quickly, not bothering to check the caller ID as she shot a worried look at the Doctor. He shifted, his breath catching, but his eyes remained closed.   
  
“Dr. Jones,” she said, trying to sound brisk and professional while keeping her tone low.   
  
 _“Hey, Martha. Stuck in traffic?”_  
  
“Oh, god,” said Martha, standing up and moving away from the Doctor. “Saturday. Lunch. I completely forgot; I’m so sorry, Tom —”  
  
 _“No, that’s alright,”_  replied Tom, though there was a sigh in his voice.  _“I’m sure I can hold the table for a while longer. Where are you?”_  
  
“Cardiff.”  
  
There was a pause on the other end of the phone.  
  
 _“. . . sorry?”_  he asked at last.  
  
“Cardiff. Wales. Something came up.”  
  
 _“Work?”_  
  
“Not . . . exactly.” It would have been an easy excuse — he was always very understanding when it came to the demands and odd hours of her job — but she cared about Tom, and he deserved her honesty. “Jack called me last night — you remember Jack?”  
  
 _“Flirty, clothes like he stepped out of a time portal, looks almost as good as he thinks he does?”_  
  
“That’s the one,” said Martha, smiling despite herself. “We have this mutual friend of ours who we’ve been worried about. He had a rough time of it a while ago, and then he sort of . . . disappeared. He’s back now, but . . .” She glanced back at the Doctor’s huddled form. “He’s in a bad way, Tom. I don’t feel right leaving him until he’s back on his feet.”  
  
 _“Is he ill? Physically?”_  
  
“Not that I’ve noticed, but it would definitely be a bad idea to leave him alone.”  
  
 _“I understand. Do you need anything? I could drive down, bring you a bag.”_  
  
“Oh, you don’t have to do that —”  
  
 _“No, no, I want to.”_  There was a genuine enthusiasm in his voice, and Martha grinned. Tom was never happier than when he was helping someone, especially her, and she rarely gave him the chance.  _“I don’t have work again until Tuesday night, and a couple days by the sea might do me good. I’ll be there by evening; we can go out to dinner, make up for missing lunch. Unless you want to stay with your friend? We could order takeout.”_  
  
“Dinner sounds wonderful,” she said, and meant it. “You, Tom Milligan, are absolutely the most wonderful man on the planet.”  
  
 _“And you, Martha Jones, are absolutely the most exciting woman. I haven’t been this spontaneous since I developed impulse control.”_  
  
“So around halfway through medical school, then?”   
  
 _“Sometime thereabouts,”_  agreed Tom with a chuckle.  _“I’ll just grab lunch, pack a couple bags, and head over. I should be there by about . . . five-thirty?”_  
  
“Sounds good. Just go to the Plass and call me when you get here.”  
  
 _“Right. See you soon, honey.”_  
  
“See you.” She closed the phone and turned back to the couch, a fond smile on her face and a warm feeling in her stomach. Tom really was a sweetheart. He and Jack had gotten on pretty well when they met, and hopefully Jack wouldn’t raise objection to bringing a civilian into the Hub. If he did, well, he would just have to get over it. Tom knew how to be discrete when he needed to, and Martha could do with the professional support of having another doctor on hand, as well as the emotional aspect of having her boyfriend around.   
  
She leaned over the couch to check that the Doctor was still asleep, and was startled to find his eyes open as he stared blankly at the back of the couch.  
  
“Hey, Mister,” she said softly, laying a hand on his shoulder. “How are you feeling?”  
  
“You don’t have to stay, you know,” he said, voice low enough that she had to lean in to hear. “Not because of me. If your family needs you —”  
  
“ _You_  need me,” she said firmly, cutting him off. “Like I told you at breakfast, my family is doing much better. They’ll survive without me for a while.”  
  
He was silent for a long time, eyes blank and body more still than it ever was in sleep. Even utterly shattered, having already bared his soul to her in a flood of tears and confessions, the Doctor still couldn’t let go of his shields completely.   
  
“Tom Milligan,” he said at last, flatly and emotionlessly, as if he couldn’t muster the energy to make it into a question.  
  
“Um, yeah,” she said, disoriented by the subject change. “That pediatrician, remember? We’ve been dating for a while now; he’s bringing down a bag for me.”  
  
“Who’s doing what?” asked Jack, trotting up the stairs with a bag of takeout in hand. Martha jumped, not having heard the door. Really, for something so large and elaborate, it was extremely quiet. The Doctor gave a sharp intake of breath and jerked upright, but quickly registered that it was only Jack. He relaxed somewhat and slumped back on the sofa, folding in on himself and wrapping his arms around his torso. Jack glanced towards him momentarily, but didn’t comment.  
  
“Tom’s coming,” said Martha, tearing her eyes away from the broken form of her friend and turning to her (mostly) whole one instead.   
  
“To Torchwood?” asked Jack, with the beginnings of a protest in his frown.  
  
“Yes, to Torchwood,” she answered, in a tone the allowed no argument. “He can keep a secret, Jack, and I’m not going one more night without my toothbrush. Also, normal people don’t wear the same clothes every day.”  
  
“They’re not the same clothes,” protested Jack, his indignation just as shallow as her teasing, both of them forcing light-heartedness that they didn’t feel into their tone, trying to think about each other and the banter and the Chinese food and anything besides the dullness in the Doctor’s eyes and the defeat in his posture. “It’s a look. A  _signature_  look.”  
  
“Right,” said Martha, rolling her eyes. “Because all the people who watch you on the telly would get confused if you ever skipped the suspenders.”  
  
“I have a huge fan base,” said Jack with a cheeky grin.   
  
“I dread to think of the fanfiction.”   
  
“The what?” he asked confusedly.   
  
“Never mind. Hungry, Doctor?” she asked, turning to the Time Lord, who hadn’t made a sound during the whole exchange. He shrugged apathetically, eyes fixed on the ground. “Well, hungry or not, you have to eat something.”  
  
The Doctor complied mutely, eating his way through two egg rolls and half a container of cashew chicken without so much as a word. Martha let him be, but kept a worried eye on him as she ate her own meal.  
  
“‘A good horse is like a member of the family,’” said Jack suddenly.   
  
“Sorry, what?” sputtered Martha, completely bewildered.   
  
“Fortune cookie,” he explained, holding up a strip of paper. “Here.” He tossed one to her, and to the Doctor, who caught it automatically.   
  
“‘There are many paths to the same place,’” she read. “That is  _not_  a fortune.”   
  
“Something wrong, Doctor?” Jack questioned. She glanced up to find the Doctor frowning at his fortune. He blinked and looked up.  
  
“The ‘learn Chinese’ is wrong,” he said, with a listless sort of gesture.  
  
“Not surprising,” said Jack with a shrug. “It is made in . . .” He dug a wrapper out of the bag and examined it. “California.”   
  
The Doctor made a vague noise of agreement before turning back to his blank staring. Listening with half an ear as Jack tried to initiate conversation, Martha picked up the fortune which had slipped from the Doctor’s limp fingers.  
  
 _‘Upon seeing old friends, remember that change is inevitable and often irreversible.’_    
  
~~~  
  
The Doctor remained quiet and reticent throughout the afternoon. He answered direct questions with nods and shrugs, and otherwise sat huddled on the sofa, eyes fixed on the ground but not really seeing it. The silence, from a man who normally couldn’t keep his mouth shut to save his life (literally, on occasion), was getting increasingly worrisome.   
  
At one point, in desperation, Jack dragged them all out of the Hub and onto the Plass. The Doctor merely trailed after him, hands in his pockets, staring at the sky. In the bright sunlight he looked paler than ever — like paper, like a ghost.   
  
They went back inside.  
  
Jack was actually glad when Martha’s boyfriend arrived.  
~~~  
  
Tom stared around the complex with unabashed awe. There was no question that it was incredible, this place with its insane security and its obviously alien technology, hiding beneath Cardiff, Wales.   
  
“Impressed?”   
  
And, of course, its ridiculously flashy keeper.  
  
“Very,” Tom replied, still a little dazed. He looked up at Jack Harkness, who was standing at the stop of the stairs to his left, looking very smug. “. . . who exactly pays for all this?”  
  
“It’s a government agency,” said Jack with a careless shrug. “No one can know about it, obviously, so the money’s siphoned off a bit at a time from various other funds.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Tom slowly, regaining his footing. “About that ‘no one can know’ thing —”  
  
“ _No one_  who I haven’t personally screened,” Jack cut him off harshly, his friendly, casual manner suddenly gone and replaced by the steel countenance of a man who ran the organization responsible for defending the Earth. “Secrecy is a top priority. If you can’t keep quiet, we have ways of making you.”   
  
Martha, who had been watching amusedly until that moment, gave a shocked exclamation from beside him. Tom felt himself pale, his stomach lurching. He had no doubt that the Captain was more than capable of carrying out his threat.  
  
All three of them were distracted, however, by a sharp “Jack!” from behind the head of Torchwood.  
  
The source of the rebuke was a thin, pale man whom Tom hadn’t noticed before — that friend whom Martha had told him about, he realized. He looked as battered as the old sofa he was hunched on, but his dark eyes blazed with righteous indignation as he glared at Jack.  
  
“I meant Retcon,” Jack explained hastily. “I’m not going to kill Martha’s boyfriend,” he added, sounding torn between amusement and offense. Tom relaxed slightly.   
  
“No, you’d just wipe his memory!” the man growled, springing to his feet. Tom tensed again, partly at his words but also at the way he swayed, barely catching himself before he fell. Jack didn’t appear to notice through his own irritation.   
  
“It’s better than killing anyone who stumbles across us!”  
  
“You mean anyone who gets anywhere near the truth!”   
  
“Humanity isn’t ready for the truth!” This was evidently an old point of contention between the two of them, and at a different time Tom would have been more than happy to take part in the debate, but at the moment his doctor’s instincts were screaming at him that Martha’s friend was in no condition to be rowing with anybody.  
  
He apparently hadn’t realized that himself, however, and seemed to be using every last vestige of his obviously depleted energy to match Jack’s volume.  
  
“It never will be if you keep hiding it from them!”   
  
He glanced at Martha — these were her friends, after all. She appeared to be having similar thoughts as he was, and she strode forward as Jack issued his retort.  
  
“Like you’re one to talk about hiding the truth!”   
  
“Alright, enough!” snapped Martha, stepping between the two men. The ill man’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click, and Jack seemed to recover himself as his anger drained away, looking guilty. “Captain, a word,” said Martha sternly, her eyes flashing. “Keep an eye on him?” she added softly to Tom as she passed, nodding back toward her friend.  
  
“Sure.” He watched as she dragged the sheepish captain out the door, and then turned back to his newest acquaintance.   
  
The man had slumped back onto the couch now that he no longer had a reason to remain upright. Tom glanced around, hoping that what he was looking for was somewhere easily accessible — ah.   
  
He jogged up the stairs and selected a mug that at least looked clean. Finding the tea to be cold, he took a chance on the tap water, instead. He took a seat beside Martha’s friend and handed him the cup, helping to steady it when he saw that his hands were trembling.  
  
“Thanks,” said the man, his weak voice and dull eyes a sharp contrast to his earlier passion.   
  
“Don’t mention it,” said Tom, setting the empty mug aside. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. Tom Milligan.”   
  
“The Doctor.”  
  
“Just ‘the Doctor’?”   
  
“Yep.”   
  
“Hm.” Tom glanced at ‘the Doctor,’ examining him in a new light. He  _looked_  human — but his fingers had been icy when they brushed his, there was something about those eyes — and considering where they were . . . . “Are you an alien?” he blurted out.   
  
“Yep.” There was no emotion in his tone: no surprise that Tom had guessed; no fear of his reaction; no pride at distinguishing himself from the common human; just — exhaustion. Complete and utter weariness. Alien or not, this was a man who had nothing left to give.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Martha and Tom have a date, Jack and the Doctor have a talk, and the Universe has absolutely horrendous timing.

Jack and Martha returned to the not at all surprising sight of the Doctor hunched despondently on the sofa and Tom looking at him queerly. The young man leapt up at their approach, and Jack nodded to him in greeting as he moved past and took his place beside the Doctor.  
  
“Hey, Doc.”  
  
The Doctor tensed, but gave no other response.  
  
“Look —”  
  
“I’m sorry.”   
  
Jack would have almost thought he had imagined the words, they were so soft, except that he would never have imagined the Doctor’s voice so shaky and defeated.   
  
“. . . what?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor repeated, louder but no less pained. “I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that. It’s your agency; you’ve more than earned the right to run it the way you like.”  
  
“Doctor . . .” Jack stared at him, at a complete loss for words. He had heard the Doctor say sorry for a lot of things — many of which hadn’t been his fault — but never before had he seen him apologize for speaking his mind. He was not at all sure that he liked it. “We might want to save the shouting match until we’re both a bit more rational, but it’s alright that you disapprove of our methods.”  
  
The Doctor snorted acerbically.   
  
“Who am I to criticize your methods? It’s not as if mine work.” His face was twisted with anger again, but it wasn’t directed at Jack this time — and  _damn_ , he wished that it was, because he, at least, was strong enough to deal with it, while the Doctor was clearly crumbling beneath his own self-loathing.  
  
“That’s not true,” said Jack firmly. He leaned forward, trying to meet the Doctor’s eyes, but his gaze was fixed firmly on the ground. “Doctor, I’ve seen you save whole planets with your methods.”  
  
The Doctor shook his head in helpless denial, his throat working. Jack sighed, wishing that he could convince this incredible, impossible man that he was worth so much more than his own hatred. He couldn’t find the words, and instead settled for wrapping a protective arm around thin shoulders, hoping to offer some modicum of comfort. The Doctor allowed the embrace, but didn’t lean into it or give any other reaction.   
  
Sound carried, in the Hub, and over the thoroughly distracting sound of the Doctor’s silence Jack could hear every word of Martha and Tom’s conversation. If he could, it was guaranteed that the Doctor could too, but the Time Lord gave no indication that he was registering the words at all.   
  
Tom, predictably, was demanding to know what the hell was going on and who, precisely, the Doctor was — but he was not playing the jealous boyfriend, as Jack would have expected, questioning why his girlfriend had run off to Cardiff to spend time with two attractive males. Rather, he was asking as a doctor, as a healer, wanting to know what medical attention the Doctor had gotten, how informed they were about his physiology, and what his status at Torchwood was.   
  
Martha was answering as best she could: the Doctor was a friend, really honestly a friend; someone she and Jack had travelled with — yes, in a spaceship, but don’t let him hear you calling it that. Yes, they knew what happened to him; mostly, anyway (Jack was sure that was an enormous overstatement; he doubted they knew even half the horrors the Doctor had faced). Yes, they knew a bit about how to treat his species; enough to get by, at least. But he had ridiculously good hearing, they really shouldn’t talk about this here . . . .  
  
“Jack,” she said more loudly, making the Doctor jump as she walked back towards the couch. “Tom and I were thinking of going out to dinner; will you two be alright on your own for a bit?”  
  
“Oh, I think we can find a way to occupy ourselves, right, Doc?” Jack asked with his trademark leer, hoping to get a rebuke out of the uncommunicative Time Lord. The Doctor merely shrugged, and fresh worry flashed across Martha’s face. “Seriously, Martha, you kids have fun. I’m sure us old fogies will survive the evening.”  
  
Martha needed to inform Tom of the situation in more detail, out of earshot of the Doctor — not to mention that she would be no help to anyone if she didn’t get a break from this place. Jack had gotten out on his own before lunch, but she had been in the Hub with the painfully withdrawn Doctor for nearly twenty-four hours straight.   
  
“Right,” said Martha, equal parts reluctance and relief. “We’ll leave you two to complain about kids these days and how everything was better when you were our age.”   
  
“I wouldn’t say  _everything_. Just sex, travel, forensics, species diversity, medicine —”  
  
“Yeah, alright,” Martha laughed as she headed for the door. “Fifty-first century bloke; we’re practically the Dark Ages; I get it. Look, speaking of medicine, I’ve got a bit of a headache. Do you have any aspirin in your fancy high-tech cabinets?”   
  
“There should be some in Owen’s desk.”  
  
“Thanks.”   
  
It didn’t take long for Martha to extract the aspirin from Owen’s drawer. She said something to Tom, but Jack didn’t hear it, distracted by the look on the Doctor’s face as suddenly alert brown eyes tracked the small, white bottle. At first he thought it was fear — it was safely in the bottle and held by someone he trusted, but it was still a highly toxic substance to him, after all, and given how jumpy he had been Jack wouldn’t have been surprised by an overreaction. At second glance, however, it was something more like fascination, almost hypnotic enthrallment.  
  
Jack’s blood ran cold.  
  
“Martha,” he said, as casually as he could. “Take that with you, will you?”   
  
“Of course,” said Martha, shooting a glance at the Doctor. “We’ll be back soon.”  
  
“Take your time. You’ll need to find someplace to stay tonight, too. Torchwood can pay.”  
  
Martha nodded, and within a minute she and Tom were gone.   
  
Jack turned back to the Doctor, who was once more gazing expressionlessly at the floor.   
  
“Okay,” he said firmly, pulling his arm from around his shoulders and twisting to face him properly. “What was that look?”  
  
“What look?” asked the Doctor blankly, glancing up. “There was no look.”  
  
“Bullshit. I saw your face when Martha was holding that aspirin. You were looking at it like it was the Holy Grail. Like it was the answer to all your troubles.”   
  
The Doctor glanced away, refusing to meet his eyes, but Jack persisted, steeling himself and asking the question that he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know the answer to.   
  
“Do you want to die?”   
  
“If I were suicidal, I hardly think that hiding the aspirin would stop me,” said the Doctor tiredly, with half-hearted scorn.   
  
“That’s not what I asked. Doctor —” Jack suddenly gripped his shoulders and forcibly turned his paper-thin frame to face him. “ _Do you want to die?_ ”   
  
“Yes!” The word seemed to slip unbidden from the Doctor’s lips, an honest answer startled out of him by the unexpected movement and the force in Jack’s words. The Doctor looked even more shocked than Jack was that it had escaped him, but he didn’t try to take it back. Instead, he continued, anguished words pouring out of him almost against his will.  
  
“I’m sorry; I’m so sorry, but I can’t do this anymore; I can’t keep running any longer and every time I try to stop everything falls to pieces and I can’t breathe without smelling fire and death and blood and please, Jack, I just want to  _rest_ ; I just want to sleep without waking up screaming. I’ve been saving this planet and this Universe for so, so long and I love it so much, I do, but it isn’t  _enough_  and I still lose everything that matters and I don’t want to be strong anymore!”   
  
He was crying again, choking on his words, shaking like a leaf beneath Jack’s hands.   
  
“You don’t have to be,” said Jack, keeping his voice as firm and even as he could, pulling his friend into an embrace and stubbornly fighting the tears that were filling his own eyes. God, he hadn’t known it was this bad; he had seen the exhaustion in the Doctor’s eyes and face and posture but had never imagined that it stretched so deeply into his soul, that he would ever be sitting here listening to the most amazing man he knew bend and buckle and break under a load that had become unbearable.   
  
“I promise, Doctor, you don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have anything to be sorry for. Martha and I are going to take care of you and of this stupid planet for as long as you need. All you have to do is keep breathing, alright? And hey —” He pulled back a bit, gently cupping the Doctor’s face in his hand and giving a muted, sincere version of his trademark grin. “You’re not going to lose me anytime soon.”  
  
The Doctor gave a watery chuckle, a small, shaky smile appearing on his face.  
  
“Couldn’t get rid of you if I tried.”  
  
Right then, one of the Rift alarms went off.  
  
Jack leapt up, cursing in every language he knew as he vaulted down the stairs.   
  
“ _Fuck_ ,” he concluded hotly as he pulled out his cell phone.   
  
So much for a quiet evening in.  
  
~~~  
  
“Goddamn it, Jack!”   
  
 _“Believe me, I’m not happy about this either,”_  growled Jack on the other end of the line. Gwen could just picture him, his teeth gritted and his knuckles white. She wondered what evening pursuit of his had been interrupted by the unexpected crisis as she gave Rhys a rueful grimace across the table.   
  
“Right, what is it?”  
  
 _“Rift activity. Looks like something big came through — and there are life signs.”_  
  
“Sentient, do you think?”  
  
 _“Probably, it’s a pretty sophisticated craft. I’ve already called the others; I’ll text you the address. Whatever this thing is, we need to get to it before the police do.”_  
  
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She shut the mobile and looked at Rhys apologetically. “Honey, I’m sorry —”  
  
“Go ahead,” he sighed, with a long-suffering grimace. “At least we managed to have dinner together. I suppose getting through dessert is too much to hope for.”  
  
“Don’t wait up.”  
  
She kissed him on the cheek and darted for the door.  
  
It only took her about ten minutes to get to the park where Jack’s text had directed her. She arrived at the exact same time as he did, nearly creating a new pile of smoking wreckage as they both screeched to a halt inches from collision. She slammed her door and climbed out with a scowl already on her face, ready to give Jack an earful about his driving skills (or lack thereof), only to find someone else doing it for her.  
  
“Oh, yes, that’s a brilliant introduction to the planet,” the Doctor was saying scathingly as he climbed out of the passenger seat. “‘Hello, welcome to Earth, we can’t even drive our own vehicles, how would you like us to help repair yours?’”   
  
“Says the man who can’t even hit the right century half the time,” Jack shot back, slamming his door shut and beginning to stride towards the crashed spacecraft which was smoldering in the distance. Behind him, Gwen shot a questioning look at the rest of Torchwood as they piled out of the SUV, but all she got was an eye roll from Owen and twin shrugs from Ianto and Tosh.   
  
“Out of all of time and space, hitting the right  _millennia_  — and  _planet_ , for that matter — is like hitting an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert from orbit. I think I do pretty well considering that I’m working with a temperamental Type 40 TARDIS which is older than I am and which, by the way, is meant to have six pilots.”  
  
“I think I liked it better when you weren’t talking,” grumbled Jack, but there was a note of humor in his voice and a warmth in his eyes that belied his cross words.  
  
The banter was cut off as they approached the crash site. Jack snapped into command mode, barking orders left and right, and the Doctor fell silent, fading into the background as Torchwood leapt into action.   
  
“Ianto, Gwen, set up a perimeter. I don’t want anyone else stumbling across this. Owen, stand by. Whatever’s in there is still giving off life signs; it’ll probably need medical attention. Tosh, see if you can — Doctor!” Jack suddenly lunged forward and wrapped an arm around the alien’s torso, yanking him back and away from the smoking ship which he had been drifting towards, unnoticed by the rest of them.   
  
“What are you doing?” growled Jack, his eyes blazing, half with fury at the affront to his authority and half with terror at his friend’s close call. “We haven’t scanned that yet; we don’t know if it’s hostile!”  
  
“No, it’s not, it’s — can’t you hear it?”  
  
Gwen paused in her work to watch the two of them, startled by the pain in the Doctor’s voice. Jack’s face was quickly morphing from anger to confusion. The Doctor was leaning against him, face ghostly pale in the dying light, staring with wide eyes at the still-burning ship.   
  
“Hear what, Doctor?” questioned Jack.   
  
“It’s — it’s a Lithilian, Jack — he’s telepathic, and he’s — gah!” The Doctor’s knees buckled, only Jack’s quick reflexes keeping him from crumpling to the ground.   
  
“C’mon, Doc,” said Jack, wrapping a supportive arm around his friend’s waist and easing him further back from the ship. “We’ll just move back, get you out of range —”  
  
“No!” gasped the Doctor. “No, don’t you see? He’s dying! He’s cut off from his people, alone in his own head for the first time in his life and he’s  _dying_  —”  
  
“Alright, Doc, alright, we’ll help him, just breathe, okay? Owen, Tosh, forget scans; get that thing open.”   
  
“It’s too late,” groaned the Doctor, even as Tosh and Owen started forward. “There’s nothing you can do. He’s already —” He cut himself off with a strangled sob and went limp in Jack’s arms.  
  
“Doctor? Doctor!”  
  
“Jack.” Tosh’s voice cut through Jack’s urgent, nearly frantic inquiries. Her face was stricken, and Gwen could sympathize, her gut twisting from both the picture the Doctor’s words were painting and the sheer pain in his voice and his face as he choked them out. “The life signs have stopped.”

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ianto reevaluates his feelings, Jack’s coat is vaguely significant, and Martha is startled by her own righteous indignation.

The Doctor may have been thin, but he was still tall and bony and awkward, and Jack could only support his weight for so long. He sunk to the ground as the Doctor slumped against him, arms wrapped protectively around his shaking friend. Above him, he could hear Owen taking charge — “Alright, people, cleanup and catalogue; you know the drill.” — and part of him was grateful for that, and proud of his team. The rest of him was preoccupied with the man in his arms.  
  
The Doctor had fallen silent, once more leaning into the warmth which he so obviously craved, his thin hands twisted in the fabric of Jack’s coat and clinging to it as if it was his last anchor to reality. He was shivering again, pale and cold and fragile as night fell around them and Jack tried desperately to soothe him.   
  
“Doctor, it’s alright. It’s over.”  
  
“It’s not,” whispered the Doctor, shaking his head against Jack’s chest. “It’s never over. Everything has its time and everything dies and it’s inside my head all the time it never  _stops_.”  
  
“I’m sorry, Doc,” Jack sighed, threading a hand through his hair. “God, I’m so sorry.” Sorry he didn’t know how to help him. Sorry he had ever left him alone. Sorry he had taken him out into the field, had given the Universe the opportunity to hurt him again.  
  
The Doctor whimpered, clutching Jack’s coat even more tightly.  
  
~~~  
  
Finished with his task, Ianto spared a moment to observe Jack and the Doctor. Jack was cradling the alien protectively, murmuring softly and rocking him ever-so-slightly with a tenderness that Ianto hadn’t known he possessed. The Doctor was actually weeping quietly in his embrace, apparently oblivious to his audience.   
  
God, had he really been frightened of this man, this frail, broken figure who trembled in the encroaching darkness? Had he really felt threatened by him, this person whom Jack comforted like a parent would a frightened child, who clung to Jack out of pure, honest fear and desperation? Had he really hated him, pathetic and vulnerable as he was?  
  
“Ianto!”   
  
He looked around, just in time to catch the keys that Owen had thrown at his head.   
  
“We’re going to be here a while,” said Torchwood’s doctor. “Take Gwen’s car; get those two back to the Hub. Give the Doctor some tea and blankets and try to stop him shaking.”  
  
He nodded in acknowledgement and moved towards Jack and the Doctor. Jack glanced up at his approach, craning his neck to look at his subordinate from his place on the ground, completely unabashed.   
  
“Owen wants me to drive you back to the Hub,” said Ianto, trying to ignore the awkwardness of the situation and match Jack’s casualness.   
  
“Right,” said Jack, shifting a little. Gently — so gently, Ianto had never seen him treat anything or anyone with such care — he extracted his coat from the Doctor’s white-knuckled grip. He pulled the alien — his friend, his dear friend, as evidenced in every look and touch and word — to his feet with him, and took a moment to make sure that he could stand on his own before stepping back to strip off his coat.   
  
He draped the heavy garment around his friend’s shoulders, and beneath the compassion and care (love, even) in his eyes, there was something else, something that Ianto couldn’t place. It wasn’t until they were in the car, with Jack in the backseat stroking the Doctor’s hair and murmuring soothingly and looking at him as if he was the most precious thing in the Universe, that Ianto realized.  
  
It was guilt. Practical, efficient, do-what-needs-to-be-done-and-never-show-weakness Jack Harkness was visibly guilty over the Doctor.   
  
But  _why?_  From what Ianto could gather — and gathering information was what he  _did_  — Jack had not been even remotely responsible for any of the events that had left the Doctor so obviously shattered. In fact, he had helped him — saved the world with him (or the Universe; he was a bit uncertain on that), and then —  
  
And then . . . .  
  
And then he had left him. Jack had left the man that he spent a good portion of his life trying to find, the man who had just gone through the same hell he had, for Torchwood. For them. And that man had proceeded to crumble into the quivering, devastated mess in the backseat.  
  
Ianto glanced in the rearview mirror. The Doctor was huddled into Jack’s side, eyes open but unseeing, still shivering despite the heat that Ianto had cranked up and the two long coats wrapped around him. Now that Jack thought no one was looking, the normally unflappable head of Torchwood had allowed his eyes to slide shut and his face to crease with pain and guilt and worry.   
  
Ianto turned his eyes back to the road. When he pulled up to Torchwood a few minutes later, he had managed to gain control of his suddenly turbulent emotions, and when he opened door for Jack his face was perfectly composed.   
  
“I’ll put the kettle on.”  
  
By the time he had prepared the tea and coffee, Jack had settled the Doctor on the sofa and was sitting beside him, speaking to him softly and urgently. Ianto caught the tail end of the one-sided conversation as he approached.  
  
“. . . just don’t give up on us, Doc, okay? If you don’t want to do anything, don’t want to say anything, that’s fine. Just  _don’t let go_.”   
  
The Doctor’s only response to Jack’s entreaties — almost pleas — was to withdraw further into the shelter of his coats. He did glance up, however, when Ianto stopped in front of them with the tea tray, and unfolded himself slightly to accept the cup of tea with shaking hands.   
  
“Thanks, Ianto.” Jack seemed to be about to say something more, but was interrupted when his earpiece beeped. “What?” he snapped irritably as he stood up. There was a pause, during which his frown deepened into a scowl. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Another pause, and he cursed viciously. “Fine. I’ll be there in ten.” He turned off the earpiece and turned to face them again.   
  
“Owen says some of the locals are kicking up a fuss; there’s a civilian who’s got connections in UNIT, he’s talking about calling them. . . . I’ve got to go sort it out. I’ll be back as soon as I can, I promise.” He was talking to both of them, but these last words were directed mostly at the Doctor.  
  
The alien blinked at him for a moment, but then started as if something had suddenly occurred to him. He hastily set down his tea and extracted himself from Jack’s coat, which he then held out to its owner. Jack eyed the proffered garment with an odd, unfathomable expression, before taking it and draping it over the Doctor’s shoulders once more.  
  
“Keep it, Doc. What’s mine is yours.”   
  
With that last, and a slightly lackluster imitation of his usual grin, he turned to Ianto and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.  
  
“Let me talk to you for a sec.”  
  
Ianto followed him to the conference room, where they would be out of earshot of the Doctor, and spoke before Jack could.  
  
“Yes, I’ll keep an eye on him for you.”  
  
“You sure?” asked Jack seriously. “There’s another friend of his I can call —”  
  
“I’m sure,” replied Ianto firmly. “You needn’t worry, Jack. I think we’ve managed to mend bridges well enough, and I’m not in the habit of kicking people when they’re down. No need to interrupt Dr. Jones’ dinner date.”  
  
“How did you — never mind, I don’t want to know. Just don’t leave him alone for too long, and most human medication is toxic to him, so whatever he says, _don’t_  give him any.”   
  
“Yes sir,” Ianto nodded, trying to ignore the sinking feeling that he was in over his head.   
  
“Good. Ianto . . . .” Jack was suddenly right in front of him, his warm hand caressing Ianto’s cheek, his blue, blue eyes warm and deep and  _right there_ , and Ianto’s breath caught — “. . . . I really appreciate this.” And then he stepped away.   
  
Ianto swallowed.  
  
“I’ll think of a way for you to make it up to me, sir.”  
  
“I bet you will!” laughed Jack over his shoulder as he walked out the door.   
  
Ianto followed him.  
  
~~~  
  
For a very long time, Ianto and the Doctor sat in silence. The Doctor didn’t seem inclined to talk, and Ianto didn’t know what to say. At long last, when the tea was gone and his shaking had faded to the occasional tremor, the Doctor spoke.  
  
“You’re friends with Jack.”   
  
“Yes,” said Ianto, a bit too quickly. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes, sir. Jack and I are friends.”  
  
“Good.” The Doctor nodded in acknowledgement, gazing at the empty teacup wrapped in his boney hands. “That’s . . . that’s good.” He was silent for a moment longer, then looked up suddenly, catching Ianto’s eye. “Is he — is he alright?”   
  
“Sorry, sir?” asked Ianto, taken aback.  
  
“Jack. Is he doing okay?” The Doctor’s concern seemed sincere, his pale, wan face creased with worry, his eyes deep and pained — god, how did he ever pass for human with those eyes?   
  
“He’s fine,” replied Ianto, trying to hide his disconcertion. “As far as I can tell, anyway. Why do you ask?”  
  
The Doctor crumpled. His eyes darted away, and the posture that Ianto hadn’t even noticed relaxing tensed and withdrew once more. He opened his mouth, closed it again. For a moment Ianto thought that he had scared him off, sent him skittering back into himself — but then the Doctor managed words, choked and brief though they were.  
  
“There were some things that happened — bad things, my fault — and Jack —” He cut himself off, his throat working.  
  
“Jack was hurt,” Ianto supplied.   
  
The Doctor nodded silently. Ianto examined him — this man whom he had spent so long hating and fearing, the man who had just admitted to being responsible for the new shadows that Ianto saw in Jack’s eyes at odd moments — and was surprised to find that he held no resentment for him. Instead, he felt only pity — pity and sympathy, because he knew what it was like to have hurt someone you loved.   
  
“I think that, usually,” he began, choosing his words carefully, “when you’ve hurt someone you care about, hurting yourself doesn’t make them feel any better.”  
  
Whatever response he had expected that — disdain or indifference, contradiction or more unfathomable silence — the chilling, hollow chuckle that he received was not it.   
  
“Oh, Ianto Jones,” the Doctor said, his lips twisting into a smile that was full of bitterness and self-loathing. “The things I’ve done go far beyond Jack Harkness.”   
  
Ianto remembered why he was afraid of him.  
  
~~~  
  
When Martha called Torchwood, feeling like an irrationally worried young mother but unable to go another second without checking on the Doctor, it wasn’t Jack who answered.  
  
“Hi, this is Dr. Martha Jones. Is Jack available?”   
  
 _“I’m afraid not, ma’am,”_  said the polite, cultured voice on the other end of the phone.  _“He’s out in the field at the moment.”_  
  
“Oh, well . . . I’m sorry, who am I talking to?”  
  
 _“Ianto Jones, ma’am.”_  
  
“Right. Mr. Jones . . .” She trailed off, unsure how much Jack’s colleagues knew and how much she should reveal to them. Fortunately, Mr. Jones seemed to know what she was thinking.  
  
 _“The Doctor is here with me. There was a bit of an incident earlier, but he’s still in one piece.”_    
  
“What sort of incident?” she asked, alarmed. She turned her back for ten minutes and he managed to get himself into trouble —  
  
 _“I believe it was some sort of psychic encounter.”_  
  
Her mouth went dry. God, the last thing the Doctor needed right now was something messing with his head.  
  
“But he’s alright?”  
  
The pause which followed only increased her worry.  
  
 _“I’m not sure I’m the one to judge that, ma’am,”_  said Mr. Jones at last. Martha took several deep breaths, trying to fight the dread rising in her throat.   
  
“Can you put him on?”  
  
There was another pause. Finally . . . .  
  
 _“He’s a bit busy at the moment. I can give him a message, if you like.”_  
  
“He’s right next to you, isn’t he?” sighed Martha. “And he doesn’t want to talk to me.”  
  
 _“Yes, ma’am.”_  
  
“Right. Thank you. Just . . . tell him that I’ll be there soon.”  
  
 _“Of course, ma’am.”_    
  
~~~  
  
“Are you sure about this?”   
  
“Tom . . .”  
  
“Alright, alright, I’ll let it be. Just don’t stay too long, yeah?” He still looked a bit raw and shell-shocked from absorbing all that she had told him, but his eyes were soft and caring and his hand was gentle against her cheek. “He’s got other people to look after him, and I don’t want you burning out.”  
  
“I’ll be fine, Tom,” Martha assured him with a tired smile, and was reasonably certain that she was telling the truth. “You go and get us checked in; I’ll catch up with you in an hour or so.”   
  
“Will do. Take care of yourself, sweetheart.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
Martha watched him drive off, then turned to the visitors' entrance. She braced herself as she went through the elaborate security measures, but was still unprepared for the rush of emotion which hit her when she caught sight of the Doctor.   
  
There was heartache, of course, and a touch of panic, because he was pale and skinny and frail, curled in on himself beneath two layers of coats and trembling nevertheless, and god, he had really, truly broken this time — but beneath that, unexpectedly, there was a surge of white hot anger. Not at Jack, who had a job to do, or at the unfortunate Ianto Jones, who was sitting across from the Doctor and looking completely at loss — but at the whole stupid,  _goddamn_  Universe that wouldn’t give a shattered man a moment’s peace.  
  
She forced herself to smile as she neared them, even though she felt like crying.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack is frustrated, Owen bullshits like there’s no tomorrow, and basically everything is horrible.

“Dr. Harper.”   
  
Owen stopped and turned toward the couch, too startled at being addressed by the Doctor to be frustrated by this latest interruption to his work.   
  
“Yeah?” he asked, noting automatically that the Doctor was still trembling. It had persisted for long enough now that he was doubting his initial diagnosis of shock, and beginning to suspect an underlying condition — PTSD, or something of the like.  
  
“Jack may say that he doesn’t need sleep, but he still needs rest,” stated the Doctor, his voice strong and matter-of-fact, his eyes alert and concerned. “You’re his physician. Can you order him to take a break?”  
  
“Sure. I can also order the sun to stop burning, but there’s no chance in hell that it’ll happen.”  
  
“Right, yes,” said the Doctor with a grimace. “I suppose he can be a bit stubborn.”   
  
“I was thinking ‘a pigheaded pain in the arse,’ but that works too.” Owen glanced over his shoulder to the conference room, where Jack was having an intense discussion with Dr. Martha Jones.   
  
 _If we get any more doctors in this place we could open a fucking practice._    
  
“We need to find a way to make him relax for a while,” said the Doctor with a frown, following his gaze.   
  
“It might help if you were this talkative when he was within earshot,” Owen informed him bluntly.   
  
“No,” said the Doctor, shaking his head and dismissing the idea without a word of explanation.  
  
“Of course not,” Owen said, rolling his eyes. “Well, he’s not going to leave your side until you’re better, and I suppose you’re not going to get any better until you stop worrying about him never leaving your side. Right pair of lovebirds, you two are.”   
  
The Doctor shrugged unhelpfully, and Owen gave an exaggerated sigh.  
  
“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not making any promises.”  
  
~~~  
  
“. . . no one can keep living like that forever. Something had to give eventually, and as it turns out, that something was him.”  
  
Jack gave a growl of frustration, turning away from Martha and pacing over to the glass wall of the conference room. She was right, of course — the Doctor’s lifestyle was unsustainable. His eventual collapse had always been inevitable, and if all Jack could do was give him a safe place to come to ground, then he would make damn sure that he did. Still —  
  
His train of thought was interrupted as he finally registered what he was watching in the Hub below him.  
  
“He’s talking to Owen,” he stated. “He’s talking to  _Owen_. He hasn’t said one word to either of us in hours, but he’s talking to fucking  _Owen_.”  
  
“Ianto said that he talked to him earlier,” Martha volunteered. “To Ianto, I mean, not to Owen.”  
  
“ _Why?!_ ” demanded Jack, spinning around. “Why is he talking to my team and not to us?”  
  
“I think I can answer that.”  
  
They both turned towards the voice. It was Owen, standing in the doorway and looking uncharacteristically wary.   
  
“Well?” snapped Jack. “Out with it.”   
  
“The Doctor’s over-stimulated,” said Owen. “He’s not human; he doesn’t filter input the same way we do. The psychic shock of his encounter with that alien damaged some of his mental shields — like the ones that allow him to suppress unpleasant memories. You two have too many bad experiences associated with you; he can’t function around you until he recovers a bit.”  
  
“He told you this?” Martha asked, sounding concerned and alarmed.  
  
“More or less,” answered Owen with a shrug.  
  
Jack frowned. It made sense, in a way — the Doctor’s mind was almost certainly the most alien part of him, and it was definitely true that he had a lot of history with Martha and Jack — but something about the explanation still seemed a little off . . . oh. Oh, God.   
  
It wasn’t just the memories. He had nearly forgotten, and the Doctor hadn’t said anything — but of course the Doctor hadn’t said anything, when he was so convinced of his own worthlessness, so desperate for any sort of contact.  
  
Desperate enough to cling to a man whose very existence repulsed him.   
  
And now his defenses were shattered; there was nothing to protect him from the tangible, physical discomfort that Jack’s presence caused him. In his typical, unthinkingly selfless way he had put aside his own pain in favor of sparing Jack’s feelings. Now, though, it had obviously become unbearable — and he was still trying to soften the blow. Jack felt sick.  
  
Owen evidently took Jack’s silence for resistance; the small doctor crossed his arms and sighed.  
  
“Honestly, Jack, the best thing you can do right now is give him some space. Go shag Ianto or something. Gwen won’t let him top himself, and I’ll finish the paperwork.”  
  
“Yeah, okay,” said Jack, clearing his throat as Martha flinched at Owen’s casual referral to the Doctor’s suicidal tendencies. “You do that.”  
  
“Great. Not like I was planning to sleep tonight, anyway.”  
  
~~~  
  
“They’re leaving,” Owen informed the Doctor.  
  
“Good,” he stated, his face grimly satisfied, his eyes dark and unreadable.   
  
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Owen added. “Jack looked like I’d hit him or something when I told him you needed space.”  
  
“He’ll get over it,” the Doctor said firmly, though Owen thought he saw him suppress a flinch. “I’m not letting him burn himself out over me.” He ran a shaking hand over his face and through his hair with a sigh, before standing unsteadily. “Thank you, Dr. Harper.” He offered his hand.  
  
Owen took it. It was icy and boney and trembling. The alien eyes that met his were impossibly weary, and the cursory smile that the Doctor presented him with was as false as ever, small and thin and hopeless. Quite abruptly, he came to a decision.  
  
“Owen. Looks like you’re going to be here a while,” he elaborated at the Doctor’s surprised look. “Might as well get on first name terms.”  
  
The Doctor eyed him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “Right. Thank you, Owen. I’ll leave you to your work, then.”   
  
~~~  
  
In their hotel room, Tom listened to Martha’s outpouring of anger and grief, and held her as she cried. Afterwards, he gently wiped her tears away, kissed her tenderly, and helped her forget broken hearts and tattered souls, for a while.   
  
~~~  
  
In Ianto’s flat, there was nothing gentle about what he and Jack did. It was frustration and fear, helpless rage against an uncaring Universe of prosperous monsters and shattered saviors. Afterwards, Jack slept for the first time in days, and was without nightmares for the first time in months.   
  
~~~  
  
In the Hub, Owen and Gwen and Tosh went about their tasks, only occasionally glancing towards the hole beneath which the frequent savior of the planet slept.  
  
~~~  
  
In his sleep, the Doctor wept.


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are jelly babies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who’s read this story, doubly so to anyone who kudo-ed and/or commented, and I hope you’ve all enjoyed this as much as I have.

_Two months later . . . ._  
  
“Where’s the Doctor?” Jack asked as he trotted into the Hub. His question had been directed at Gwen, but it was Owen who answered with a roll of his eyes.  
  
“Same place he’s been for the past three days.”  
  
“Has he eaten?” Jack inquired with a glance at his watch.  
  
“I brought him a sandwich earlier,” said Gwen.  
  
“Good.” Jack gave her an approving nod before heading down to the archives. “Hey, Doc. Ianto.”  
  
Ianto glanced up and nodded in greeting, well aware that he wasn’t the one whom Jack was there to see. The Doctor made a vague noise without looking up from the device he was engrossed in. There was a plate beside him with the remains of the sandwich — it looked like he had gotten about halfway through it before getting distracted.  
  
“Is that thing going to rip any holes in the Universe if you twitch the wrong way?” Jack asked, gesturing at the complicated, blinking object in the Doctor’s hands.  
  
“What? No. It’s just a brain teaser. Oi!” This last, rather high-pitched protest was provoked by Jack pulling the thing out of his hands and setting it to the side. The Doctor glared at him petulantly. “I almost had that!”  
  
“You’ll figure it out later. Right now, I need to talk to you.”  
  
The Doctor stiffened, his eyes going dark, an almost tangible shield coming down between them.  
  
“What about?” he asked warily.  
  
“UNIT’s finally caught onto the fact that the TARDIS is in Cardiff,” stated Jack, keeping his voice calm and matter-of-fact to try to counteract the fear-edged defensiveness rising in the Doctor’s eyes. “They’ve been asking questions — want to make sure we’re not dissecting you or anything. I just need to know how much you want me to tell them.”  
  
The Doctor shifted, his brow creasing in thought. Behind him, Ianto quietly rose and left the room.  
  
“Who’s in charge of UNIT, now?”  
  
“The British branch? A General Skinner, but it’s a woman named Captain Magambo who’s in been calling me about you, and lately a brigadier, Sir —”  
  
“Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart,” the Doctor finished for him. “He’s a friend,” he explained at Jack’s questioning look. “An old friend. Tell him . . . tell him that I’m fine. That I’m just taking a break for a while.”  
  
It wasn’t too far from the truth. While the Doctor wasn’t and would probably never be entirely whole, he was certainly better than he had been when he crashed back into Jack’s life in a shattered wreck of tears and pain. He was no longer skin and bones, and, despite the inordinate about of time he spent in the archives, he had regained some of his color. He still didn’t sleep much, and never without nightmares — it sometimes took long minutes to calm him when he woke with a scream in his throat and terror in his eyes — but he didn’t tremble constantly, and he spoke when the occasion called, and his smile didn’t always look like broken glass and emptiness.  
  
It was progress.  
  
“He won’t believe it’s from you.”  
  
“No, I suppose not . . .” The Doctor leaned back, rubbing the back of his neck thoughtfully. The scar was still there. Some things never healed completely. “I know! Tell him that I’m out of jelly babies.”   
  
~~~  
  
Three days later, a box was delivered to the Tourist Information Centre. It contained two dozen bags of jelly babies.  
  
The Doctor  _laughed_.


End file.
